In the world of consulting, time is everything. Yet, it’s remarkable how much of that time is wasted on repetitive and low-value tasks. This isn’t just an industry issue—it’s a personal frustration for many professionals. A recent conversation with a friend working at one of the top consulting firms shared his frustration: “Consulting is so different from what I expected. I didn’t sign up to take notes, adjust colors, and do basic summaries.”
These frustrations are common. Having spent my career in strategy, consulting, and market research, I’ve seen firsthand how much of our valuable time is consumed by tasks that don’t require deep expertise. So, how can we solve this? Artificial intelligence (AI) offers tremendous potential to transform consulting workflows, save time, and free consultants to focus on what they do best: thinking strategically and delivering high-value insights.
Here are some specific consulting tasks where AI can deliver enormous value:
1. Automating Note-Taking During Interviews
In many consulting engagements, senior consultants or managers lead interviews while junior analysts are typically responsible for taking notes. But instead of learning, the note-takers often feel like robots, trying to capture every word. This creates stress, and the quality of the notes can suffer, leading to gaps that must be filled in later. It’s a tedious process, and one that many analysts dread.
AI Solution: A high quality transcription tool that can automatically transcribe the conversation, remove filler words, enhance clarity, and even convert the transcript into organized notes for each interview question. This way, consultants no longer need to worry about taking perfect notes and can fully engage in the conversation.
Benefits: This would save hours of manual effort, improve the quality of notes, and boost job satisfaction for analysts and consultants alike. Consultants analysts could focus on listening and learning during the interview, rather than typing every word.
2. Organizing and Compiling Interview Responses
After interviews, responses are often manually copied and pasted into spreadsheets or word documents, separated by questions, and organized for analysis. This repetitive work not only takes time but also leaves little room for learning or engagement.
AI Solution: An automated system that categorizes interview responses by question and aggregates responses across interviews.
Benefits: Eliminating the need for manual data entry reduces the risk of errors and saves significant time, allowing consultants to focus on deeper analysis rather than administrative work.
3. AI-Assisted Analysis of Interview Responses
Once all interviews are collected, consultants spend hours summarizing responses and identifying key insights. Group-based analysis, which is crucial for understanding trends and themes, can be especially time-consuming. Finding relevant quotes from interviews is another challenging task that requires re-reading transcripts multiple times.
AI Solution: AI-powered tools can quickly analyze large amount of interview responses. You can abstract insights from one interview or from all the interviews under one project. You can compare groups similarities and differences in seconds or easily find a comprehensive list of high quality quotes, which can take hours if you perform these tasks manually.
Benefits: This would save consultants significant time, allowing them to focus on delivering more comprehensive insights to clients. It would also enable consultants to deliver more detailed analyses, increasing the quality of the final deliverable and improving client retention.
4. Real-Time Updates for Internal and External Teams
Consultants often need to provide updates to management or clients, summarizing interview progress and insights. These updates require time-consuming data compilation, which can take focus away from more strategic tasks.
AI Solution: A platform that compiles interview progress, automatically generates insights, and presents them in a report or slide format. The platform could allow management and clients to access real-time updates and even use AI tools to query the data themselves.
Benefits: Consultants would no longer need to manually prepare updates. Instead, management and clients could access the latest data at any time, leading to increased satisfaction and more efficient project management.
5. Streamlining PowerPoint Creation
Building PowerPoint presentations from scratch is another time-consuming task for consultants, particularly when it involves manually creating charts or updating data. A quick draft version is often needed to get started, but this can take hours of work.
AI Solution: A platform where consultants can input thoughts and data to generate editable PowerPoint slides with pre-built charts. As new data becomes available, the platform could automatically update the charts, allowing for quick adjustments.
Benefits: This would eliminate the need to build presentations and charts from scratch, enabling consultants to export insights and visualizations directly into ready-made slides, saving time and ensuring consistency.
Conclusion
Consulting is about delivering high-value insights, not getting bogged down by administrative tasks. AI has the potential to revolutionize the consulting industry by automating these low-value tasks, allowing consultants to focus on what truly matters: helping clients solve complex problems and deliver transformative results.
BTI (Boston Tech Insights) platform is laser focused on consulting and market research with very powerful interview and survey analysis features. With BTI platform, your team can outperform your competitors in all the critical AI use cases mentioned above.