Artificial intelligence is increasingly changing the way work is delivered in the professional services sector, as well as the expectations of clients. Consultancy.uk sat down with two leaders in the field – AI strategist Walter Pasquarelli and Deltek Vice President of Product Management Bret Tushaus to find out how consultants can adapt their models to make the most out of AI’s opportunities.
The lines of the conversation around artificial intelligence are being re-drawn. While two years of red-hot hype have seen companies experiment, plan for and adopt the technology, there is now a sense that expectations are shifting.
“To be frank, one of the things that I’ve realised over this past period is how quickly people lose their sense of wonder,” says Walter Pasquarelli. “If you think about any standard Generative AI tool when it came out, people were like, oh, this is magic. This is crazy. This is going to automate people away. And now, businesses and people are much busier with the genuine areas of application.”
Pasquarelli is an internationally recognised AI leader, who has helped to shape policy and business perception of emerging technologies for over a decade, along with leading thought leadership and advisory programs within The Economist Group. Honing in on AI’s evolution in the consulting sector, he highlights how quick clients have been in embracing the technology.
“Put simply, I don’t think clients care so much whether something is AI generated or not. I think they will care about whether the outputs are good, whether the outcomes distinguish themselves, whether they’re just generic or whether there’s anything new. In an age where we see more and more synthetic content, the origin of things is much less important than the outcome, or the experience it provides.”
With the well-known benefits of AI set to be unlocked, adopting AI into client services has become a new reality for consultants. A recent report from Deltek found that 74% of partners believe successful AI implementation can deliver substantial competitive advantage. While a Harvard Business School study at one of the top-tier firms showed that significant productivity gains could be achieved, including in complex, knowledge-intensive tasks for engagements.
“These figures underscore a fundamental truth: AI’s impact on consulting is more than mere efficiency. Instead, it continues to transform how value is delivered to clients,” says Pasquarelli.
On the inside
On the inside, AI has already shown the ability to add value for consulting firms. “In the past two years, we’ve witnessed an exponential improvement in AI models and platforms,” says Bret Tushaus from Deltek, a provider of solutions to professional services firms. In his role as vice president of product management, he has first-hand followed the developments of AI from its nascent stages. He also oversees the company’s own AI solution, Deltek Dela™.
“There are several quantifiable examples of AI in practice,” he says. Sales and business development is one area. “Generative AI can speed up the RFP [request for proposal] process. We’ve seen consultants feeding a bunch of proposals that they’ve done in a certain area of their business into the tool, in order to deliver a new one in the space of a few minutes.”
“They prompted the GenAI tool to write a proposal based on past experience and based on what’s being asked. And the accuracy and the fidelity with which the tool can produce that output, saves so much time. It’s obviously not the final product one would submit, but in terms of getting the process running, knowing what format, what’s important in this RFP, and capturing some of that past history – Generative AI creates a significant time savings, not to mention that the proposal is probably better in terms of putting the best foot forward.”
Another apparent use case lies in the management of information, rapidly tailored to different stakeholders such as partners, project managers and finance teams. “Accounting systems, ERP systems, those types of tools can be complex. Knowing where to go for information, what report to run, which command to run, that all adds time and effort – and not everyone can be a power-user.”
Yet with Generative AI-powered assistants, that information can be pulled up with a single command. “In Dela for instance, project managers can ask, ‘Tell me what the current AR is on Project X’, or partners can ask, ‘What is the profitability of all our work for Client Y.”
“Getting an answer instantaneously changes everything. It enhances decision-making, and frees up resources for the firm – and that’s valuable to all kinds of personas within a consulting organisation.”
AI as the assistant
Following up, Pasquarelli explains that tools like Dela could be an important link for businesses to finally understanding how to deploy AI technology in a constructive way. While much of the early discussion around AI focused on how it was going to replace human labour, or “automate all of us away”, the last two years of progress have shown that as good as Gen AI products might be, they will always require human oversight.
“In principle, you could run an entire business through a through a GenAI tool, but then it’s going to pretty much produce garbage. It will be generic and high-level. As it is based on approximating previous pieces of human work, it’s not going to have new ideas, and the technology sometimes hallucinates, so it may produce incorrect output.”
“What companies have learned is there is always a balance and a sweet spot that needs to be found. On the one hand, automation to yield time savings is important. But on the other hand, the correctness or the quality of things must be underwritten by people.”
Tushaus agrees, “AI is not going to replace consultants. While it will take over some of the knowledge work that they do, that’s more some of their logistical operational tasks; high level scenario planning, and maybe some preliminary analysis. Human consultants do a lot of validation, and they do a lot of data research by themselves. And then of course, there’s all the creativity in bringing all the human insights and all the human knowledge to that.”
Brave new models
With questions around data security and privacy at play in the development and adoption of AI, it will be important for consultants to be up-front about their processes. Clients will be keen to understand what they are paying for, and what risks they might be exposed to as a result of consulting work which leverages the technology.
To that end, Pasquarelli notes that “the larger the models become, the more the transparency decreases”. As a result, it’s “always a good thing to clearly mark something as either entirely AI generated or that there has been major AI involvement,” depending on the kinds of output at play.
Tushaus adds that as clients increasingly come to expect that firms are using AI, consulting companies will need to establish a clear governance and compliance towards AI-disclosed deliverables. “Providing transparency is key, because in the end, consulting is a business that revolve around trust.”
The traditional model is passé
With the continued rise of AI, both Pasquarelli and Tushaus contend that the traditional way of doing business – charging client on time spent and a heavy focus on billable hours – will become obsolete. “AI is redefining the lines between time and productivity,” says Pasquarelli.
“Indeed, moving away from the traditional hourly rate model to one based on the impact of expertise is a significant shift in how businesses value and compensate experts. This business model emphasises the transformative power of expertise and encourages experts to focus on delivering real value to their clients rather than just selling their time,” Tushaus adds.
Pasquarelli gives an example he recently encountered in his work as an advisor. A famous PR firm that had adopted new AI tools told its client, “A new marketing campaign shouldn’t take you two weeks, it should be developed in two days.” With AI, he says, “they delivered on that promise.”
“That is the future. If I put myself in the shoes of consulting leaders, the model of billable hours should be under scrutiny. Time will no longer be the key factor driving business models of consultancies. They will need to distinguish themselves in terms of the value delivered to their clients.”
The two experts therefore describe the future of consulting as one where the ‘hybrid advisor’ prevails. The old consulting model is dead – an AI driven hybrid consulting type of business is how the future will look like, while human ingenuity will remain an essential part of competitiveness.
Not moving towards that future is a serious risk, contends Tushaus. “By embracing AI-use, consultants can show clients that they are a progressive type of organisation. They are aware of this technology, and they’re using it. Because quite frankly, I think that gives prospects and clients more confidence in your business versus someone that’s ignoring it and not realising the difference it can make.”
