How Generative AI is Making Research More Efficient

For professional services firms like management consultants, market researchers, and IT services, performing quality research is essential but time-consuming. Fortunately, new generative AI tools can automate many research tasks to increase efficiency. According to our report, Setting the Pace: How Management Consultants are Leading the genAI Revolution, 80% of management consultants are already using generative AI tools in their daily tasks, with over a third integrating them into at least half of their workflows. As a result, more than half (56%) say these tools save them an average of 3–4 hours per day. Where are professional service providers realizing these time-savings?

Quickly research client industries

When beginning work with any new client, you need to develop an intimate understanding of the client’s industry, including trends, disruptions, regulations, supply chain issues, and competitor landscape. This typically requires reading through many lengthy industry reports to identify key details, which can take more time than you have.

That’s where generative AI thrives. It’s no surprise that 77% of consultants rely on the tool for conducting research, making it the most common use case. With a simple prompt—such as “Analyze auto industry reports from the past two years and summarize current trends, market size, key players, risks, and opportunities in 250 words”—you can receive a synthesized brief in seconds.

By leveraging AI-driven research, teams can save hours of manual reading and analysis. For example, a firm working with a telecom client could prompt the AI to highlight essential industry KPIs, M&A activity, political factors, and global trends—ensuring the team starts with a well-rounded industry overview. Therefore, resulting in greater efficiency, higher-quality insights, saving you time and resources throughout the project.

MORE: How to conduct deeper market and competitive intelligence research

Automate company profile research

Developing detailed profiles on clients, competitors, partners, and other companies is essential for consultants before key meetings and deliverables. However, conducting research and gathering information ranks among the top tasks that consultants believe genAI could take over, reducing the time spent on repetitive work. With generative AI, consultants can instantly generate company profiles by simply providing a company name and relevant prompts. Rather than spending hours compiling data manually, genAI can produce critical details on history, leadership, financials, products/services, and operations – in seconds.

For example, a prompt like “Write a 200-word company profile overview for a specific pharmaceutical company including history, founders, total employees, leadership team, top products, revenue, and recent acquisitions” would allow consultants to gather background quickly and in a well-structured form.

Researchers could also substitute competitors or partners to efficiently build profiles needed for strategy projects. This accelerates the ability to develop company briefs, especially for firms or markets where information is scarce—which could put you ahead of your competition.

MORE: Top 5 ways professional services teams are using generative AI

Generate overviews of market research reports

In almost any client engagement, consultants need to synthesize market research reports covering trends, forecasts, benchmarking data, and best practices related to the client’s industry and business needs.

However, these reports often run over 500 pages, making thorough analysis time prohibitive. Generative AI can read and digest these long reports to produce short abstracts highlighting the most important insights, charts, takeaways, and recommendations.

For example, researchers can prompt the AI to “Please read the 2022 Forrester Research Report on Digital Transformation Trends and summarize the key findings, data points, and recommendations in a 300-word abstract.”

Rather than needing to read the full report, consultants get the essence to incorporate into deliverables. This enables one report abstract after another to be produced to build a knowledge base, which can then be easily sent to other key stakeholders.

MORE: Follow trends in financial services for better business intelligence

Research recent news and developments

Monitoring news and current events most relevant to a client is hugely valuable but requires constant research. Generative AI can rapidly find the latest news, scandals, executive changes, product releases, lawsuits, and more based on company or industry prompts. This keeps consultants continuously updated on happenings that may impact client work with minimal effort.

For instance, prompts like “Summarize key news and events over the past 3 months for Coca-Cola” or “Find the most important mergers and acquisitions in the software industry in Q3 2022” can yield summaries of the events most relevant to ongoing projects. This application saves analysts time while ensuring real-time awareness, allowing you to make decisions with relevant information.

MORE: How to capitalize on generative AI to enhance decision-making

Challenges in using Generative AI to improve efficiency

While generative AI has immense potential to enhance research efficiency for professional services firms, there are challenges to consider—particularly around accuracy, reliability, and trust.

Information Accuracy and Trust Deficit

First and foremost, ensuring information accuracy is integral to any consultant research. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that 34% of consultants express concerns about gen AI generated inaccuracies, and an equal percentage worry about becoming too dependent on AI tools. The Future of Work 2025 report also highlights a significant trust gap in generative AI among a wide range of professionals, with only 12% fully trusting AI insights.

To increase confidence, human oversight is essential.  You should always verify your sources and ensure that you are using accurate information to power your reports as generative AI does not always cite sources and may inadvertently include incorrect or outdated data in its outputs.

Privacy, Security, and Responsible Use

Beyond accuracy, security risks are a pressing issue. 58% of consultants cite privacy  security as top concerns, and 46% specifically identify data privacy challenges when using AI for efficiency gains. This underscores the importance of clear governance, ethical AI implementation, and robust security measures to ensure AI-generated insights align with compliance and confidentiality standards.

Despite these challenges, when used with proper oversight, generative AI remains a powerful tool for streamlining research, improving productivity, and supporting high-quality decision-making. The key is striking the right balance between automation and expert validation to mitigate risks while maximizing efficiency gains.

Customization and Oversight

AI-generated research undoubtedly unlocks time, but making sure generated deliverables are tailored to each client remains crucial.  Professionals must refine AI-generated insights to ensure accuracy, relevance, and strategic fit. Even for clients in the same industry, customization is key—one-size-fits-all summaries often miss the nuances that shape business decisions.

AI’s limitations in accuracy and contextual understanding remain a concern, as 27% of consultants notice a lack of empathy and emotional intelligence. To address this, consulting firms are prioritizing advanced AI training, with 42% reporting high-level training—nearly three times the cross-industry average.  In order to truly overcome such limitations, advanced training must go hand in hand with human oversight to ensure that AI outputs are not only technically sound, but contextually relevant and customized to client needs.

Key Takeaways

1. Efficiency Gains: Generative AI tools can save consultants significant time, with stats showing that 56% of consultants save an average of 3–4 hours per day.
2. Common Use Cases: The most common applications of generative AI include industry research, company profile creation, and market report synthesis.
3. Challenges and Solutions: Address concerns around accuracy, trust, and security, and suggest practical solutions like human oversight and robust security measures.
4. Customization Needs: Tailoring AI-generated insights to each client is crucial to ensure relevance and strategic fit.

Get a head start on efficient research with Generative AI

Generative AI has immense potential to automate tedious research tasks for professional services firms. While human oversight is still needed, AI can analyze information with heretofore unmatched speed.

Ready to transform your research processes? Read our comprehensive report to discover how management consultants are leading the GenAI revolution.

Gain in-depth insights and access our toolkit to learn best practices for maximizing research efficiency with AI. Download here