After having worked for a leading consulting firm in the development of their AI department, I realized that most consultants keep telling their clients to invest in AI, while their own firms are lagging behind in keeping up with AI…
In this article, I will share my experience in building internal AI skills, hiring data scientists and developing new business models related to AI for a consulting firm.
I will also share my opinion related to the future of consulting firms that can be threatened by tech firms and the blurry boundary between data scientists and consultants.
Access to information & Better data analysis
Consultants provide expensive insightful advice and guidance based on research. However, a significant part of what is paid for with consulting services is data analysis and presentation. Consultants gather, clean, process, and interpret data from disparate parts of organizations depending on the mission.
Indeed, data challenges have ensured the necessity of a human interface to the data. However, key data is often missing or hard to access. These problems created a situation where companies seeking data-driven answers to key strategic questions required experts (consultants) to create, combine, clean, analyze, and interpret data.