How forward-thinking consultants are using genAI to save time, sharpen strategy, and boost client value
By now, it’s highly likely that at least some conversation around generative AI has entered your professional life in consulting. Whether through client conversations, internal pilots, or vendor tools, most consultants have had some exposure to genAI. But awareness alone isn't enough. The real differentiator lies in how it's being used—and by whom.
According to our latest research, Setting the Pace: How Management Consultants Are Leading the GenAI Revolution, 80% of consultants are already using genAI in their day-to-day work. From accelerating research to drafting deliverables, genAI is helping firms unlock new levels of productivity and insight, freeing up time to focus on the strategic work that clients value most.
In this article, we highlight five practical ways consultants are applying genAI today to deliver faster, think deeper, and stay ahead of the curve.
- Automating Market and Industry Research
Before a client engagement, you’re expected to be fluent in their sector, competitors, and trends. But conducting this type of market research typically involves hours of sifting through reports, data, and news, leaving you little time to analyze the research to most effectively serve your client.
With genAI, that’s changing. By crafting specific prompts, consultants can generate tailored research briefs in minutes. For instance:
“Summarize the current state of the wearable health tech market using data from CB Insights and recent news. Include market size, growth projections, and key competitors in approximately 250 words.”
This kind of prompt gives you a fast, focused starting point—allowing you to spend more time analyzing insights, not gathering them.
Report Insight: 56% of consultants say genAI has improved decision-making, while 55% cite increased efficiency.
- Drafting Client Deliverables at Speed
Once you've gathered your research and developed strategic recommendations, the next step is turning your insights into client-facing content—slide decks, reports, and executive summaries that are sharp, tailored, and easy to digest.
While the strategic thinking still depends on your expertise, generative AI can help accelerate the drafting process. You can prompt it to create initial content for presentations, documents, and emails.
For example, if you’re preparing a growth strategy deck for a retail client, you might ask:
- “Create a slide with a chart showing revenue growth over the past five years.”
- “Write 2–3 bullet points summarizing competitive threats in the retail space.”
- “Generate a 200-word executive summary highlighting key challenges and opportunities.”
GenAI can quickly generate draft content—charts, text, and bullet points—that you can refine and tailor to your client’s specific needs. The result: less time formatting slides, more time applying your judgment and insight where it counts.
Think of genAI as your junior analyst—useful for generating first drafts, but still requiring your expertise to ensure client-readiness.
- Analyzing Transcripts, Reports, and Financial Filings
Reviewing and extracting insights from long-form documents—like earnings call transcripts, annual reports, inspection findings, and contracts—is a vital but time-intensive part of consulting work.
Manually combing through hundreds of pages to identify key points can take hours, especially when juggling multiple client projects. That’s where genAI proves valuable.
Instead of starting from scratch, you can prompt the AI to do the initial review for you. For example:
“Summarize the last three years of 10-K filings for Company X. Include key financial metrics such as revenue, margins, debt levels, and cash flow.”
In minutes, the AI delivers a focused summary, pulling out the critical numbers and priorities to inform business decisions. This lets you skip the repetitive review process and jump straight into the strategic thinking your clients are paying for.
AI acts as your analyst assistant—handling the heavy reading so you can focus on what really matters: interpreting the data and shaping client decisions.
Report insight: Consultants using genAI report saving 3–4 hours daily—much of it reclaimed from tasks like document review.
- Monitoring News and Market Developments
Keeping clients informed on market trends is essential—but staying on top of several sources daily can eat into your strategic time.
To streamline this process, genAI can scan thousands of news items and generate summaries tailored to client sectors. For example:
“Summarize top retail industry news from the past week, focusing on ecommerce, omnichannel strategy, and Amazon/Walmart.”
Within seconds, genAI delivers a news briefing spotlighting key developments—think M&A activity, sales forecasts, and leadership shifts—saving hours of manual reading.
Report Insight: 56% of consultants say genAI improves decision-making by distilling overwhelming information into client-relevant insights.
MORE: : GenAI’s Expanding Influence on the Future of Work
- Processing and Analyzing Client Data
When working with clients, you're often handed large datasets such as sales figures, customer data, operational metrics, and more. Manually reviewing and interpreting this information can be a slow, time-consuming process.
GenAI can help by quickly scanning and analyzing these data sets to quickly surface key trends and insights. For example:
“Analyze this customer purchase data and identify differences in buying behavior between new and returning customers. Highlight peak sales periods and top-performing products by region.”
Having this information efficiently highlighted frees you to focus on developing strategic recommendations tailored to the client's goals based on the data trends, rather than deciphering those trends themselves
Instead of spending hours in spreadsheets, AI gives you a focused summary of what matters most—so you can spend your time making sense of those trends and develop actionable recommendations tailored to your client's goals based on the data trends
Report Insight: 55% of consultants say genAI significantly increases efficiency, helping them spend more time on high-value strategic work.
MORE: Your checklist for responsible generative AI
The Future of Professional Services with GenAI
While the above are today’s most practical applications, the consulting use cases for GenAI are expanding rapidly. Leading firms aren’t just experimenting; they’re investing in training, governance, and scaled adoption.
In fact, our report found that:
- 42% of management consulting firms have already implemented advanced AI training—nearly triple the 15% cross-industry average.
- Firms delaying adoption risk falling behind those already delivering faster, smarter, and more strategically with genAI.
This isn’t about replacing consultants—it’s about elevating their capabilities. The consultants and managers who embrace genAI now will be better equipped to lead engagements, uncover insights faster, and deliver deeper value to clients.
Is your genAI strategy keeping pace with the industry?
Get the full report, Setting the Pace: How Management Consultants Are Leading the GenAI Revolution, for more data-backed insights, firm benchmarks, and practical next steps.