WILL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE REPLACE BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANTS?

With ChatGPT taking the world by storm, several clients have asked whether artificial intelligence and language models will one day fully replace human business and digital transformation consultants in an increasingly automated world.

The short answer is, "not yet"!

The longer answer is, "perhaps, to a certain extent, but only if businesses take steps to help them fully leverage AI and, over time, reduce their dependency on external consultants."

Transformation requires a profound understanding of the industry, market, and customer behaviors, wants, and needs. It requires the organization to look outward to anticipated market trends and opportunities. It also requires the organization to look inward to examine its internal capabilities, capacity, weaknesses, and any competitive advantage it possesses.

Devising a go-to-market strategy requires creative thinking to analyze and address all these elements.

Although AI can automate specific tasks and offer valuable insights into data, it is currently unable to understand and navigate complex organizational, cultural, and human dynamics. To be dependable and accurate, AI must also have access to massive amounts of data from which to learn and make predictions. This data is not always available or accessible in some industries or businesses, and access to clean, accessible, complete, and reliable data has proven to be notoriously difficult to achieve within many organizations.

Language models, such as ChatGPT, can help obtain helpful information, answer questions, and gain insights based on the data on which they have been trained. Still, they need to become more capable of providing the strategic guidance and expertise a seasoned human consultant can offer when developing comprehensive business or digital target operating models.

AI and language models like ChatGPT can free up the human consultant's time, allowing them to focus on more complex and strategic tasks by answering routine questions and giving them access to valuable data-driven insights and automated analytics.

Interestingly, automated machine learning based on hoovering massive amounts of information by data-scraping the internet and social media is leaving enterprise data management in the dust. To catch up and exploit AI to improve their reporting and data-driven decision-making, especially real-time decision-making, organizations must continue to do the hard work of capturing the reliable data they need and making it available to data analytics tools.

To further step up and use this to advance business strategies, the enterprise will have to draw insights from various data sources. It could involve aggregating operational and supply chain information and data from customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and service management solutions. This approach will ease the heavy lifting currently left to internal staff or consultants.

To summarize, while AI and language models like ChatGPT can only partially replace human business and digital transformation consultants, they can significantly enhance their capabilities.

As technology advances, we expect to see AI and language models playing an increasingly important role in supporting and augmenting the work of people in these areas.

To achieve great results, business leaders will need to understand the capabilities and limitations of AI and language models and how to exploit these tools to support and enhance the work of human consultants. They must also solve their internal data management problems.

If you are a strategy consultant, you can rest knowing that your job is safe. Well, for the moment, at least!

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