“Consulting is dead. Here are 3 prompts that replace what McKinsey charges $500k for.”
I keep seeing these types of posts on LinkedIn. And it gets more ridiculous every time.
Consulting is not dying. In fact it has survived everything thrown at it.
In the 1990s, SAP and Oracle were supposed to make consultants redundant. ERP systems would codify how businesses ran and eliminate expensive advisors. Who needs consultants when the software thinks for you?
What actually happened: ERP created one of the largest consulting booms in history. The software was complex, the implementations were brutal, and the organizational chaos that followed required armies of experienced people to sort out. The threat didn’t shrink consulting. It actually grew the market.
Then came offshoring. Early 2000s. Analytical work, modelling, research, all heading to lower-cost markets. Margins were supposed to get gutted.
What actually happened: consulting moved up the value chain. The production work moved out in many cases. The judgment work didn’t. The industry adapted and kept growing.
Then analytics platforms in the 2010s. Tableau. Power BI, etc. Clients could do their own analysis without hiring a firm.
What actually happened: data created more confusion, not less. More dashboards, fewer decisions. Demand for people who could make sense of it and drive action went up, not down.
Between the 1970s and 1990s, the global consulting market grew consistently through two recessions. Every wave of disruption that was supposed to kill consulting ended up feeding it.
The pattern is pretty consistent. Each disruption changed what consulting work looked like. And every time, the industry found the work that still required human judgment, earned relationships, and the ability to walk into a complicated room and help people make decisions they were afraid to make alone.
AI is the next wave. It will displace some categories of work, just as every wave before it did. Plus this time the structure of the industry is also changing (Pyramid model, outcomes, etc.). That’s worth taking seriously.
But consulting dying? That’s absurd. My bet is the market is going to keep growing, because business and organizations are getting more and more complex.
In the end, what you need to ask yourself is whether your positioning is built around the work that gets displaced or the work that doesn’t.
If your value is “we’re good at the work,” that’s a big problem. If your value is “we know things about your specific situation that no internal team and no AI tool can replicate quickly – and here’s how we’ve fixed it for others like you many times before,” that’s what has survived all of these disruptions so far.
So yes – some consulting firms will fail. Lazy, undifferentiated positioning will be the reason. Not a prompt pack.
—
Ready to add $100k-$500k revenue to your consulting business in 12 months or less without burning out? Schedule a call and let me show you how.
