How Consultants Are Increasing Productivity with AI: NYC Roundtable Insights

8.9.2025

Lauri Eurén

How Consultants Are Increasing Productivity with AI

Executive Summary

Consulting firms are undergoing a major shift in productivity with artificial intelligence (AI). Early adopters accomplish in hours what once took weeks, using AI to generate insights, automate research, and prepare deliverables. Yet the benefits remain uneven. Some firms are racing ahead while others lag. To thrive, consulting organizations need sharper AI-powered offerings, proprietary data-driven advantages, and scalable expertise. Just as importantly, the consultant role itself is evolving. The work is moving from spreadsheets and slides to delivering outcomes and emphasizing the human authority over them as well as fluency with digital tools.

A case in point: McKinsey’s internal AI platform Lilli. Within a year, 75% of the firm’s 40,000 employees used it regularly, saving 30% of time spent on research and synthesis. Abhishek Upadhyay, one of the product leaders behind Lilli, emphasized that “it’s never just about the tech – adoption succeeds when process and people are redesigned along with technology.”

Not every consulting firm can create their own Lilli, but they can all get the same lesson. Successful AI adoption depends as much on people and process as it does on the technology. In fact, the firms that focus on adopting AI tools to serve their people and to improve their processes are the ones that will win by boosting productivity and redefining client value propositions.

Those that delay risk falling behind.

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“The Future Is Here, But Unevenly Distributed”

Although the imperative to embrace AI is broadly appreciated, AI adoption across consulting is uneven.

Some firms already weave AI into workflows, while others barely experiment with co-pilots. An entirely different group of consultants have gone AI native, building their entire offerings on AI stacks instead of traditional tools. This trend in particular is bound to grow in the future. Students at NYU Stern already combine frameworks with AI to generate project plans in one session, work that used to take weeks.

Meanwhile, many consultants still rely on manual research that might bring comfort and confidence, but is unable to match the speed, and more often the quality, of what the AI native firms produce.

As T. Alexander Puutio, author of AI for MBAs and former manager at BCG put it when quoting William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” Puutio uses this line to highlight that some teams are fully integrating AI as an extension of their capabilities, while others are only beginning to experiment.

He further highlighted how leadership, and their appetite for risk and innovation, is what makes the difference between which group the company falls into.

Leaders who invest in AI-forward platforms and training make adoption the norm, breeding long-term commitment instead of simple pilot projects. Those who buckle under cultural resistance or the lack expertise face creating a widening gap that they will find difficult to bridge after others have moved far ahead. And to see how far the others are going, look no further than McKinsey (Lilli), Bain (Sage), and BCG (Deckster) who illustrate how major firms see AI as core to competitiveness, not just an add-on to consider.

Ultimately, this “uneven distribution” is both a warning and an opportunity. Early movers are capturing disproportionate gains, but moving early carries risks too. Leaders could invest heavily in AI only to see new models make their work redundant or discover little real efficiency improvement (CNBC, Fortune). What differentiates winners isn’t speed alone, but vision and execution in embedding AI into everyday consulting work.

And not every new AI tool needs to be built inhouse. The pace at which AI is developing means consulting firms have access to a growing number of tools through their vendors and partners, allowing them to leapfrog the build stage and move straight to deployment.

The Consultant of the Future

Just as the toolkit of the consulting firm is growing, so too is the consultant’s profile changing.

Tomorrow’s consultants combine human authority with digital fluency, and the traditional pyramid structure of consulting, where large numbers of junior consultants handle research and analysis, is shifting. Many of those lower-level tasks can now be automated by AI, and in many cases they should. This means fewer roles devoted purely to manual work and a greater emphasis on judgment, client interaction, and specialized expertise.

Their value lies in:

Outcome Orientation: The focus is on ensuring recommendations translate into real client impact. As The Trusted Advisor argues, the true measure of value is whether advice drives change that feels right for the client.
Soft Skills and Human Authority: AI can generate answers, but it can’t replace authority or relational trust. As Puutio and others remind us, consulting is still “built on relational trust, deep listening, and genuine investment in clients’ long-term success.”
Tool Fluency: AI is one tool among many. Top consultants know when to use it, when not to, and how to integrate outputs into broader client work.
Continuous Learning: Consultants who adapt quickly to new tools and methods, while doubling down on creativity and judgment, will remain indispensable.

AI will radically shift the productivity frontier of the individual consultant. This means that the firms themselves will also need to expand and adjust.

Traits of High-Performing Consulting Firms in the AI Era

AI will not only redefine how individual consultants work but also redraw the contours of what makes a consulting firm competitive. The foundations of success remain, but their expression is changing.

In the years ahead, the firms that rise above the rest will share a set of distinguishing characteristics, each shaped by how AI is embedded into their strategies and structures.

Sharper, Specialized Offerings – Firms succeed by narrowing focus. AI-driven tools for supply chain or compliance can create repeatable outcomes in a niche.
Unique Data and IP Advantage – Firms that build and protect proprietary data – and use it to train internal AI – create solutions that competitors can’t easily match.
Productization of Services – Leading firms turn expertise into scalable services.
Embedded AI at Scale – Firms that stop at scattered pilots or siloed automation will quickly fall behind.

Case study: Inside McKinsey’s Lilli

Launched in 2023, Lilli quickly became more than just another AI pilot. Acting as a digital research assistant, it could synthesize decades of firm knowledge in seconds, draft slides, and respond to consultant queries.

Within months, adoption surpassed 75%, saving consultants close to a third of their research time. That kind of uptake didn’t happen by accident. McKinsey paired the rollout with rigorous training, structured support, and a deliberate change-management plan.

Abhishek Upadhyay, the product leader behind Lilli, described the challenge bluntly: “Rolling out to 40,000 consultants meant anticipating endless edge cases. The only way forward was to test, refine, and test again.”

What mattered most wasn’t the model itself, but how consultants learned to use it. Training them on prompts proved as important as building the system. Behind the scenes, success also depended on carefully curated data and an orchestration layer that could pull from multiple models at once.

Equally critical was the human side. Communities of practice emerged to share lessons across teams, and leadership backed the initiative to ensure adoption didn’t stall. In the end, Lilli’s real breakthrough wasn’t technical. It was cultural.

Call to Action: Process, Platforms, People, Organization

For consulting leaders, the mandate is simple: don’t wait. Build capabilities across four areas:

Process: Reimagine workflows with efficiency in mind. Use AI where it helps, but keep focus on client outcomes.
Platforms: Invest in secure, scalable tools and data environments. Treat platforms as strategic assets, not one-off projects.
People: Upskill consultants, foster AI champions, and value interpersonal authority as much as technical fluency.
Organization: Rethink the consulting pyramid. With lower-level work increasingly automated, firms need to restructure teams to emphasize judgment, client engagement, and specialized expertise at all levels.

Consulting is at an inflection point. Productivity will rise, roles will evolve, and competitive lines will be redrawn. Firms that align process, platforms, and people will not just keep pace but will also redefine what it means to deliver value in the AI age.

As T. Alexander Puutio has noted after speaking with more than 600 leaders across top consulting firms:

No one has the secret sauce yet. But you can be sure everyone is pouring money into the problem and trying to find it. The question is: who gets it right?

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