Your Consulting Firm Just Hired a Country of Geniuses
What remains when analysis becomes free
These reflections started with a conversation with Anders Madsen, who runs BCG Sweden, but they've become something bigger - a bet on what consulting becomes when analysis stops being scarce.
The junior consultant role as it existed for 50 years just ended.
BCG equipped thousands of consultants with AI agent systems. McKinsey built proprietary platforms executing multi-stage research loops autonomously. The work that took a team of analysts three weeks - gathering data, running models, building frameworks - now happens in an afternoon, and this is transforming the whole advisory industry.
Erik Brynjolfsson has this thought experiment I keep returning to: Imagine creating a country of geniuses. Nobel Prize-level minds in every domain - strategy, operations, finance, organizational psychology, game theory. Make millions of instances of each one. Run them at 100x human speed. Let them collaborate in real-time.
Think about what that might mean practically, for the consulting industry. You're working on a retail transformation. You now have genius-level teams who've analyzed every retail bankruptcy of the last 50 years, every successful turnaround, every supply chain innovation. Another team running game theory on competitive responses. Another simulating organizational change patterns across thousands of transformations. All running in parallel. All synthesizing insights in real-time.
That's not consulting becoming 10% more efficient. That's a different game entirely.
And it forces a question nobody in the industry wants to answer:
What's actually being sold when analysis becomes abundant?
What AI Just Commoditized
Recent research shows 87% of consulting buyers cite trust as the primary factor in choosing firms. Not capability. Not track record. Trust.
There's this model called the Trust Equation that's been used in professional services for decades: Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation.
AI just commoditized the first two variables.
Credibility through expertise? ChatGPT has read every strategy framework ever published. Reliability in execution? AI doesn't have off days, doesn't make arithmetic errors (at least if you're a semi-competent prompter), processes information at scale humans can't match.
What remains is Intimacy and Self-Orientation. Can this person be trusted in the room when hard decisions get made? Are they genuinely oriented toward the client's success, or optimizing for something else?
Which means we need to be brutally honest about what parts of consulting are about to become commodities, what parts get supercharged by AI, and what parts remain irreducibly human. Because getting this wrong doesn't just change your org chart. It determines whether you're building a consulting firm or a cost center with a prestigious logo.
Breaking Down the Value Stack
So let's be precise about what happens to consulting when genius-level analysis becomes abundant.
What Gets Automated (Table stakes for the future):
Market research and competitive landscape mapping
Financial modeling and scenario analysis
Data gathering and initial synthesis
Framework application and pattern matching
Benchmark comparisons across industries
Report generation and documentation
This is 60-70% of what junior consultants do today. It's already happening. IBM's internal data shows productivity gains of 40% in these areas. That's not a projection. That's live.
What Gets Augmented (human + machine makes previously impossible things possible):
Cross-domain pattern recognition at scale
Rapid hypothesis generation and stress-testing
Simulating second and third-order consequences
Identifying analogies from adjacent industries
Building comprehensive what-if scenarios
Synthesizing insights across massive context
This is where the "country of geniuses" actually shows up. A partner who used to work with one research team can now orchestrate teams of specialized AI agents, each with deep domain expertise, working in parallel. The quality and speed of strategic thinking multiplies.
The traditional consulting playbook assumed capability grew linearly through repeated exposure - classroom training, client work, learning by doing. Augmentation breaks that assumption. A consultant with the right AI toolkit can operate at a level that would have required 15 years of experience, except they're in year three.
What Must Remain Human (Irreducible Relationship Work):
Building trust over years in specific cultural and organizational contexts
Telling clients difficult truths they don't want to hear
Navigating organizational politics and stakeholder dynamics
Being present during critical decisions as trusted counsel
Holding space for ambiguity and helping leaders sit with uncertainty
Taking responsibility when recommendations don't work out
This is the work that can't be systematized. The difficult conversation about whether the management team can actually execute the strategy. The honest assessment about whether the acquisition target is worth the price. The uncomfortable truth about organizational culture blocking transformation.
No AI agent is walking into a CEO's office to deliver those messages. That's still wildly human territory.
The Split Nobody's Prepared For
Watch what happens next.
Consulting might be splitting into two completely different businesses. Commodity strategy work - applying frameworks, running analyses, generating recommendations - gets automated down to near-zero marginal cost. You'll be able to buy world-class strategic analysis the way you buy cloud computing today. Usage-based pricing. Scalable. Commoditized.
Meanwhile, the high-value consulting work becomes MORE valuable and MORE expensive. Not despite AI, but because of it. As AI handles the analysis, what remains is the work that can't be systematized. And the market will pay more for it, not less, because it's increasingly the only thing that matters.
Here's the uncomfortable part: Most consulting firms are structured exactly backwards for this future.
The pyramid model - lots of junior analysts supporting smaller numbers of senior partners - worked when analysis was the constraint. Train people up through years of doing research, modeling, framework application. Build expertise through repetition.
That model is already dying. Some firms are moving to what Harvard Business Review calls the "obelisk" structure - narrow at the bottom, wide at the top. Fewer juniors, more seniors, with AI handling what analysts used to do.
But even that misses the point.
The Bet That Determines Everything
Consultants sell recommendations. But what they're really selling is someone willing to put their name on it. That's the premium. That's what doesn't commoditize.
Which creates an interesting dynamic for new entrants. Starting fresh means no legacy systems to fight, no pyramid structure to unwind, no 50-year-old business model to justify. You can build the augmented consulting firm from day one.
The established firms have the relationships but struggle to rebuild the machine. The new entrants can build the machine but struggle to earn the relationships.
Both are making bets.
The old guard is betting they can transform their business model before their brand becomes a liability. Before clients realize they're paying McKinsey prices for analysis they could get from an AI for $200/month.
The new entrants are betting they can compress trust-building from 13 years to 3. That they can demonstrate enough wins fast enough to build relationship capital before they run out of runway.
I don't know which bet wins. Probably both, in different segments.
But I know which bet most firms aren't making: The one where you deliberately design for augmentation from day one. Where you build systems that make your best people capable of things that were impossible last year. Where you invest in relationship capital while everyone else is optimizing for quarterly efficiency.
That's not a comfortable bet. The metrics look messy. The payback is measured in years, not quarters. You're training your organization to work in ways that don't exist yet, betting on capabilities that are still emerging.
But it's the only bet that compounds.
Watch what happens to the gap over the next three years. I know for sure how I will build GRAIL in this brave new world.
