With the growing democratization of AI (no-code/low-code AI solutions, startups, etc.), management consulting firms will face an increasing number of competitors.
Competition from large tech firms
It starts with all three major tech firms that offer pre-trained models that corporate clients can use to build AI-enabled systems.
Indeed, a broad range of tools is available to help mainstream companies build anything from recommendation engines to speech-recognition and translation systems, customer-service bots and more. In these cases, a team of internal consultants and data scientists would be better suited.
For several reasons, large tech firms are better placed to serve mainstream companies in need of help with AI. Some of you might be thinking that such services still require a lot of customization and technical work to make them useful…
In reality, tech firms are already trying to fill the gap by offering consulting services. Google has opened an “Advanced Solutions Lab” that is part consulting service, part tech bootcamp. Whole teams from client companies can come to acquire machine-learning skills and build customized systems alongside Google engineers. Tech firms are evolving by becoming less only focused on technical infrastructure but also strategy and people.