Don't let AI turn consulting into a vending machine

West Monroe just made its AI-built strategy reports free. Type in your query, get a deck back. No call, no context, no consultant. It's a clever piece of marketing, and it's also a warning shot for the rest of us.

The problem is this: let AI-generated deliverables sweep the industry, and we'll end up commodotizing the very thing clients pay us for. That's a rubbish deal for the clients who pay for human insight and ownership, and a shift that could flip the entire consultancy model on its head.

Why I am still bullish about AI

Let me be clear up front. I'm bullish about AI. We use it at Trend-Setters, and our clients are right to ask how we're working with it. Used well, it compresses analysis, sharpens reporting, and gets decisions made faster. The technology is a genuine enabler, and I'd be lying to suggest otherwise.

AI can make consultants faster and sharper, but if firms start competing on automated strategy decks, they risk training clients to value outputs over judgement. (Source: TSCi)

But there's a big difference between using AI to do the work better and using AI to redefine what the work is. And right now, we're in danger of commoditizing the thing clients actually pay consultants for.

What clients are actually paying for

Free, AI-generated strategy reports sound great until you consider what clients are actually buying when they hire a consultancy. They're not paying for a deck. They're paying for thoughtful, personalized advice that takes wider contextual factors into account from an experienced human partner who's accountable for delivering real commercial value.

Consulting is a service business, and the value sits in human judgement and accountability, not in the physical strategy document. The moment we start competing on speed and volume of AI-generated documents, we've agreed to commoditize ourselves. The deliverable becomes the product. The relationship becomes the loss leader.

That's a bad trade for clients who want genuine human insight and instead receive templated outputs that they still need to interpret and challenge. And it's also a risk for consultancies, because once clients stop seeing the relationship as the source of value, the firm has already made itself easier to replace.

The risk here is that the industry, in its rush to appear modern, trains clients to expect a vending machine rather than a partner. Once expectations reset, it's very hard to change them back. And you can't charge for judgement after you've spent two years telling the market the answer is free.

The same new-toy reflex on the buy side

I see the same pattern on the buy side. Enterprises spend heavily on AI before they even have a clear view of the use case. It's the new-toy reflex. Everyone's doing it, so the budget gets approved, and the hard questions about value and ownership get deferred. But AI requires careful evaluation before you spend millions, not after. That's true for the clients adopting it, and it's true for the consultancies productizing it.

So how can consultancies ensure they work with AI in ways that create real business value for themselves and their clients? In my opinion, that'll be achieved by firms using AI to make their experienced people faster, sharper and more available to clients throughout the entire engagement. Efficiency from the machine, accountability from the operator. That combination is genuinely useful. The other version, where the agent writes the strategy and nobody owns the execution, is at best unhelpful and at worst a threat to the consultancy model as we know it.

One question to ask any consulting partner

For enterprise leaders watching this play out, the question to ask any consulting partner is quite simple. Who is accountable for the outcome? If the answer involves a tool or a free report, you already know what you're getting. If the answer is a named person with a track record and skin in the game, supported by AI where it genuinely helps, you're closer to the model that has always worked.

The industry doesn't need to choose between AI and human judgement. It needs to refuse the false choice. Use the technology. Utilize the efficiency gains. But it does need to retain the industry's greatest selling point: human judgement and accountability. And it also needs to protect the service-based model that clients actually value, because once it's gone, no agent is going to give it back.