Ever since OpenAI and generative AI tools entered the mainstream, there’s been no shortage of doomsday debates about who or what they might replace next-therapists, lawyers, artists, coders. But recently, the conversation has turned to consulting. Will AI replace consultants too?
Some are quick to think so. “Most consultants aren’t actually that smart,” says Michael Greenberg of Modern Industrialists. “They’re just smarter than the average person.” He believes that AI’s analytical strength makes it well-suited to outperform many consultants, especially those doing systematic, repeatable work.
But this framing misses the point. Instead of asking if AI will replace consultants, we should be asking how consultants can use AI to get even better at what they do. Because there’s one thing the AI revolution has made clear: AI doesn’t eliminate consultants, it elevates them.
Consulting is a deeply human craft. People who think consulting will disappear don’t understand what consultants really do. They don’t just analyse numbers and build models. Consultants understand people, navigate complexity, and drive change within organizations. These aren’t functions AI can master.
Joffrey Berti, a transformation coach and strategy consultant, puts it clearly, “AI lacks the human consultant’s ability to understand nuanced business contexts and the complex dynamics of organizational culture… especially on complex, multidimensional projects.”
Scott Wilder, Partner and Managing Director at BCG, shares a similar view, “We don’t get paid to write slides. We get paid to create insight and drive value.”
AI in Learning and Development
AI can help get to insights faster, but making those insights land still takes a human touch.
This becomes even more evident in people-centered fields like Learning & Development (L&D) and Organization Development (OD). These branches of consulting deal not just with business outcomes, but with how people think, behave, and collaborate. You can’t automate the creation of trust or the resolution of interpersonal conflicts. You can’t ask AI to facilitate a tough conversation on leadership misalignment or decode unspoken resistance in a room full of senior leaders.
As Julia, a student quoted in a New Yorker essay, put it, “The A.I. is huge. A tsunami. But it’s not me. It can’t touch my me-ness. It doesn’t know what it is to be human, to be me.”
That me-ness is the cornerstone of effective L&D and OD work. Whether it’s designing a leadership intervention on psychological safety, coaching someone through self-doubt, or reframing conflict in the moment, consultants in this space operate on trust, emotional intelligence, and intuition.
Of course, AI can still play a supporting role. It can structure content, generate draft modules, or surface trends in feedback data. But true customisation, i.e., designing for the unique context, needs, and culture of each client, is still deeply human. Consultants must ensure that what they deliver aligns not just with organisational strategy, but also with individual learning goals. That blend of insight and empathy is hard to replicate through automation.
A 2023 study by Harvard Business School and BCG found that consultants using GPT-4 completed 12% more tasks, 25% faster, and with 40% better quality. But it also showed a clear drop in effectiveness when AI was used on complex, ambiguous tasks. The lesson? AI works best when we use it where it shines and know when to take the lead ourselves.
The future of consulting, especially in L&D and OD, isn’t about resisting AI or fearing obsolescence. It’s about using AI to take care of the groundwork, so consultants can focus on what they do best: unlocking human potential, driving transformation, and navigating the grey areas machines still can’t touch.
AI can sort the data. But only a consultant can walk into a room and say,
“Here’s what really needs to happen.”
References:
- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence
- How AI is Redefining Strategy Consulting: McKinsey, BCG, and Bain | Takafumi Endo | Medium
- Will AI Replace Consultants? Here’s What Business Owners Say.
- https://thelogic.co/news/ai-consultant-reckoning/
