The New Strategy of the Strategists

If I ever found myself standing behind the Family Feud podium, one hand hovering over the buzzer as Steve Harvey asked, "Name business information AI can easily produce today," I'd hit that thing so hard I'd probably break my hand.

The answers my family and I would joyfully rattle off to the chorus of "ding!" would sound something like this:

Market sizing. Research compilation. Consumer segmentation. Competitive analysis. Business modeling. Financial sensitivity analysis. Presentations.

In other words, the very outputs that have underpinned much of the U.S.'s $30 billion strategy consulting industry for decades.

Where a CEO or board might once have spent $4 million hiring a prestigious consulting firm to dispatch an armada of nocturnal MBAs armed with proprietary frameworks and their coveted slide templates (my personal favorite remains the timeless SWOT analysis), a handful of people with the right prompts and the right documents can now produce a remarkably similar first draft in a single afternoon.

Will it be perfect? No. Will it contain gaps? Sure. But it possesses one enormous advantage over the traditional model. It can be instantly tested. "Now assume inflation is 4%,” or “What if we entered Europe first?” Seconds later, a completely new version appears. No staffing plan. No partner review. No three-week wait to schedule a meeting.

That changes everything.

So what happens when the people whose business has always been solving problems discover that their own business model has become a problem?

History gives us a pretty reliable answer. Every disrupted industry repackages itself around the disruption. Travel agents became online travel experts. Newspapers became digital media companies. Retailers became omnichannel retailers. And today...

Strategy consulting firms are rapidly repositioning themselves as AI consultancies.

Of the seven largest strategy consulting organizations, every one now promotes AI as a core service offering. AI strategy. AI transformation. AI governance. AI implementation.  Which raises an obvious question:

Couldn’t a client just ask AI about that stuff?

I did.

AI also quickly helped me estimate that roughly 130,000 people are employed globally in the strategy organizations of those same firms. So did those firms suddenly assemble the world's greatest concentration of AI experts over the past three years?

Or did they just repaint the wagon?

Don't misunderstand me.  I don't believe strategy consulting is disappearing.  Far from it. In many ways, I think it becomes even more valuable in the age of AI. Just not for the reasons for which it has historically charged a premium.

The future belongs to three things AI cannot commoditize:

Original Thought

For years, competitors in the same industry often purchased variations of remarkably similar strategies. Different logos. Different slide decks. Often surprisingly similar conclusions.  I’ve seen it firsthand when I worked at big companies and compared notes with friends at competitors.

That era is ending. When everyone has access to the same analytical engines, the obvious answers become commodities. Original thinking becomes the competitive advantage.

Every model AI learns from, every framework it cites, every dataset it analyzes ultimately began with one thing: A human being having an original thought.

That remains the scarce resource.

Craft

AI can recommend a strategy. But it cannot feel when a resort concept is missing a moment. It cannot know precisely when to pull a piece of fish from the grill. It cannot walk a construction site and notice a better solution than the blueprint suggested. It cannot sense that a customer interaction "just feels wrong.”  Or make the tiniest change to a design and have it suddenly work.

Execution is not merely following a plan. It's thousands of tiny judgments made by experienced people whose instincts were earned through doing, failing, and succeeding — not analyzing. That's craftsmanship. And it doesn't fit neatly onto a PowerPoint slide.

Leadership

Finally, everything comes back to people. Give two companies the identical strategy. One succeeds. One fails. The difference is almost never the deck.

It's the leadership.

Culture. Trust. Talent. Conviction. Those things have always been art masquerading as management science.

AI can explain leadership. It cannot inspire it.

Which brings us back to the wagon. AI isn't the snake oil. It's one of the most extraordinary productivity tools ever created. The snake oil is pretending that simply putting "AI" on the side of your consulting wagon somehow transforms decades of selling analysis into genuine innovation or expertise.

Analysis is no longer scarce. Information is no longer scarce. Templated presentations and infinite tabs of spreadsheets are certainly no longer scarce.

What has become scarce is Judgment. Craft. Leadership. And above all, Imagination.

In other words, the things that actually build great businesses.

Perhaps that's the silver lining in all of this. For the first time in decades, the value can shift from selling business information to the artistry of creating and implementing the kind of ideas that truly qualify as innovation and move their markets.

Maybe that’s what strategy consulting was always supposed to be?  Maybe now, at this critical time, the wagon starts carrying real medicine instead of snake oil?