Consultants and other professionals are standing at a crossroads—and many don’t even realize it. And it’s not a normal decision point crossroad – this is a life or death for your consultancy crossroad.

The playbook that has helped build careers and firms over the past few decades is rapidly being rewritten. Generative AI (Gen AI) is no longer a “future tech.” It’s here. It’s embedded in everyday workflows, and it’s already changing the rules of the consulting game.

Consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG, and Accenture have moved beyond experimentation. They’re building internal AI platforms, deploying AI co-pilots, and training tens of thousands of professionals to embed AI into every project.

McKinsey’s AI chatbot “Lilli” is now used regularly by over 70% of its employees. BCG staff have created over 18,000 custom GPT-powered tools to handle tasks like email drafting, market research, and proposal writing. These tools aren’t hypothetical—they’re delivering measurable returns right now.

McKinsey calls AI “as transformative as the steam engine or the internet” (McKinsey & Company, 2023). They have referred to what we face as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 4IR.

Consultants who wait to see what happens won’t just fall behind—they’ll be outpaced by firms that work faster, price more competitively, and deliver more value.

Adoption is no longer optional. It’s survival.

AI Power for Consultants
To accelerate your business with AI Power for Consultants, join the Founder's Cohort (Beta release). The 8-week course covers the stages of buildind a consulting or professional business, from start, to growth, and scaling. The course will be priced at $2,000 on final release, but the limited enrollment Founder's Cohort and the AI mega-prompt library are available for $397. Enrollment ends Wednesday midnight Pacific time, August 6.  

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Adopting AI while carrying on with your daily consulting or professional work may seem overwhelming. But doing nothing is far worse. Here’s why.

Lost Time and Productivity = Lost Revenue

Time is the most limited—and valuable—resource consultants and professionals have. AI gives us back that time. It is an incredible productivity machine when used properly.

Without AI, you're spending hours every week on manual tasks: writing proposals, summarizing interviews, researching prospects and markets, and formatting slides. Those are hours you’ll never get back. Meanwhile, your AI-enabled competitors are compressing these tasks into minutes.

Here’s what it means for your bottom line:

• Consultants using Gen AI tools save between 4 and 12 hours per week – that is roughly 200 hours a year (Thomson Reuters, 2024).
• At BCG, senior partners are saving 6+ hours per week by automating inbox management and research.
• McKinsey reports its consultants spend 30% less time on knowledge tasks using Lilli, freeing up bandwidth for client work.

Multiply that time by your hourly rate, and you’re looking at tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity every year. And that doesn’t account for opportunity costs—fewer proposals sent, fewer clients served, fewer projects closed.

Think back to what you’ve probably told more than one of your clients…

This isn’t about working harder. It’s about working smarter.

Reduced Win Rates and Profit Margins

Clients are no longer satisfied with just expertise. Given time and online research they can probably find facts, data, and alternatives online by themselves. They need more.

They expect speed, experience backed insights, and defensible innovation—and they expect you to be using AI to generate some of those solutions. The AI gives you speed, a greater number of alternative solutions, and the ability to tap into the experience of others.

In today’s market:

• 66% of clients say they will stop working with firms that don’t use AI (Consultancy-ME, 2024).
• 86% actively seek consultants who use AI to improve performance and delivery.
• Early adopters report 30%+ improvements in win rates and up to 45% more cost savings (BCG, 2024).

Firms using AI are demonstrating to clients they have faster turnaround times, offer fixed-fee packages with higher consulting margins, and generate more prospects. Consultants who haven’t successfully implemented AI are more expensive and less competitive.

Talent and Clients are Leaving for More Innovative Firms

AI is not just creating change in consulting and professional service firms. Clients of all types are changing as well with greater expectations in quality, breadth, and response time. The entire ecosystem is changing.

That change in the professional-client ecosystem means the flow of your business and clients will change.

Firms that ignore AI are risking a talent drain and a client exodus:

• 79% of AI “superusers” are actively job hunting, looking for firms that support their AI skills and career growth (Betterworks, 2024).
• Younger consultants, especially Gen Z and millennials, view AI as essential to their careers—and will leave firms that don’t invest in it (Deloitte, 2024).
• Hiring firms focused on professional work, like INDEED.COM, report that AI skills are mandatory for new workers in all white collar jobs.

Your clients are waiting for the results from AI. They expect speed, higher quality, even more professional results and deliverables. As a consultant in the Age of AI you need to be ready to deliver:

• Rapid research and reports
• High quality briefings and presentations with a day’s notice
• Interactive dashboards instead of static reports.
• Strategic recommendations based on in-depth research data, not just experience and opinion.

If you don’t provide what clients expect they will find someone who can meet their expectations.

Missing Out on New High-Value Services

AI is more than just a tool - it’s a business model accelerator. Almost every aspect of consulting and professional services can be improved with AI, it’s not just for repetitive boring tasks.

Thinking that AI is limited to only speeding up repetitive tasks comes from the days of one and two-line AI prompts. Experienced AI users and firms with AI implementation teams are way beyond that now.

My Co-Execs and AI-Assistants
I use AI Assistants to help me run my business, Co-CEO, Co-CMO, Co-Consultant, and Co-Copywriter. I built my AI Assistants in a few hours with plain vanilla Gen AI. (When I have time in the next few weeks I will add lip-synched talking avatars. Fun!)

Although I have 30+ years consulting experience and have written 27 books, I use my Co-bot assistants to find alternative ideas, look for failure points in solutions, find points of differentiation, draft articles, and get a different point of view. These AI Assistants go way beyond just accelerating repetitive tasks.

Consulting and professional firms are offering entirely new services and revenue that weren’t possible before:

• AI-readiness assessments
• Generative AI training programs for clients
• Custom GPT-powered tools for client workflows
• Niche-based AI-Assistants to give 7X24 assistance
• Subscription-based AI dashboards and insight reports

You don’t have to be a major consulting firm. Independent consultants are doing this.

In the past, I have spent three days at the San Francisco Public Library and University of California Berkeley doing competitive analysis and market research so I was "schooled up" on a client's industry, niche, and competition. (I used to be manager of competitive analysis for a division of Texas Instruments so I love digging in to this stuff.) Now, I can do the same research and analysis with AI in about an hour using Deep Research. I then take another hour to run custom AI mega-prompts that do data validation, analysis, and charting.  And I get to make coffee the way I like it.

What kind of impact does this make on revenue and investments?

• BCG now earns 20% of revenue from AI services (LinkedIn, 2024).
• PwC has committed $1B+ in AI investments, building internal tools and public offerings.
• IBM built an “AI consulting platform” that includes reusable AI agents across 160,000 consultants.

If you’re not offering AI-enabled services, your offerings will shrink while your competitors’ grow. You’ll miss the upsell. You’ll miss the retainer. You’ll miss the future.

Falling Into the Pilot Trap and Failing to Scale

I love to "tinker with tech". I’d rather do that than watch one of the thousands of British murder mysteries or spy series on TV. But tinkering with ChatGPT is not an AI strategy brings in revenue, authority, or more clients.

Too many firms are stuck in what McKinsey calls “AI pilot purgatory.” They experiment with a few tools, declare themselves “innovative,” and then never scale beyond individuals automating a small task.

Tinkering with Tech is dangerous:

• Only 4% of firms see substantial AI ROI, but they all have a formal plan for scaling (BCG, 2024).
• Nearly 90% of pilot projects stall due to lack of process integration and training (McKinsey, 2024).
• “Innovation theater” as one person called it wastes time, breeds skepticism, and delays real transformation.

To create real impact, consultants and professional firms need an AI roadmap. You need to:

• Train at three levels: executive, professional, staff
• Define easy, high-impact use cases to learn and motivate
• Identify strategic objectives, workflows, and chokepoints
• Train and build cross-functional teams to breakthrough strategic chokepoints
• Integrate AI and build a culture of innovation and acceleration
• Build prompt, GPT, and agent libraries and systems

Don't Tinker with Tech to transform your business. You need a system of insight, innovation, and impact.

What Consultants Must Do

The firms that are winning with AI aren’t tinkering - they’re committed.

If you want to catch up (and accelerate ahead of competition), here’s how to start:

1. Upskill at every level – Executives, professionals, and staff need aligned training. Everyone should know how to use Gen AI effectively.
2. Motivate and innovate across the workforce – Allow trained professionals and staff to work on easy to solve, high impact chokepoints. These may increase workflow but not increase ROI. However, they can build motivation and skills.
3. Identify strategic objectives and accelerate workflows and metrics – Identify 2 or 3 strategic workflows where AI can have a measurable impact on ROI, client attraction/retention, or productivity. (Ron Person, founder of Critical to Success, wrote one of the best-selling books on strategic performance improvement and consulted on strategic performance for 13 years.)
4. Build AI-Driven Playbooks
   Develop prompt, GPT, and agent libraries and AI-powered templates that guide everything from proposal writing to market and competitive analysis. These assets make your AI adoption repeatable, scalable, and effective.
5. Embed AI in your culture – In cultures of AI Adoption Gen AI can be at use everywhere - accelerating research, generating presentations, simulating interviews, and summarizing calls.
6. Create new revenue streams – Package your AI expertise into new offerings. Create custom co-pilots, or subscription-based Chatbots that support your niche services with 7X24 services.

Critical to Success: Accelerate with AI Power

The AI race in consulting is accelerating. If you want to lead - not lag - you need speed, a strategic structure, and support.

Critical to Success can help with all of those. Our AI Power for Consultants course is just one course that gives independent consultants, professionals, and firms a launchpad to adopt AI the right way - quickly and profitably.

Here’s what every consultant should do next:

🔹 Act now – The fastest firms are locking in competitive advantages. Waiting makes it harder to catch up.

🔹 Don’t wing it - Plan it – Successful firms have a structured roadmap that aligns AI implementation with strategy. Don’t guess. Implement with clarity.

🔹 Accelerate with expert help – Consultants and professionals who want to accelerate and be an AI leader in their knowledge domain should take the AI Power for Consultants course. The course gives business guidance in starting, growing, and scaling your business. And the course includes access to our Gen AI mega-prompt library, templates, and step-by-step playbooks. Don’t start from scratch. Start smart.

Take the Next Step: Learn AI the Consulting Way

At Critical to Success, we’ve combined 30+ years of consulting with regional and Fortune/Global 1000 companies with over two years Gen AI training into courses to upskill three levels of consultants and professionals: executives, professionals, and staff. We are rolling out training and consulting for consulting and professional service firms and individuals. The first course is, AI Power for Consultants.

AI Power for Consultants is:

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✅ Helps you implement AI across deep client research, building authority, automating marketing, highly targeted personalized cold calling, automating proposals, presentation automation, and new revenue streams

Right now, we are offering the Founder’s Launch (Beta release) for just $397 (this will be $1,997). Course registration closes midnight Pacific time on Wednesday, August 6. It’s your chance to join, accelerate your business, and become part of a group that’s shaping the future of AI-enabled consulting.

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This paper was written by Ron Person with research from mega-prompt driven ChatGPT Deep Research and with partial drafts from interactive sessions with ChatGPT 4.o.