Executives Generate McKinsey-Quality Reports In Minutes. The Consultants Should Be Nervous. The Gap Was Always Information, Not Insight.
Several executives now claim that ChatGPT and Claude produce market research reports nearly on par with what McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group would deliver, but in a fraction of the time. Advertising agencies and other specialist consultants are also being supplemented, or threatened, by AI tools that increase productivity, speed, quality, and testing of content creation.
This illustrates the principle of value unbundling. Consultancies sold you three things bundled together: information gathering, analysis, and presentation. AI commoditizes the first two almost completely. The mechanism is called cognitive task decomposition. When you break a complex professional service into discrete steps, AI handles the data synthesis and drafting steps at near-zero marginal cost. The remaining premium is judgment, which fewer buyers actually need than consultants would like you to believe.
Executives across multiple industries are using ChatGPT and Claude to replace or supplement work previously done by McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and advertising agencies. The results, according to these executives, approach the quality of traditional consulting studies.
- Open ChatGPT or Claude and paste a prompt like 'Conduct a market analysis for [your industry], including competitor landscape, growth trends, and three strategic recommendations.' Expect a structured report in under two minutes that reads like a first draft from a junior consultant.
- Take that output and ask the same tool to critique it: 'What are the weakest assumptions in this analysis? What data would a senior partner at a consulting firm challenge?' Expect a surprisingly honest list of gaps.
- Ask the tool to revise the report addressing each weakness. Expect a second draft that is noticeably sharper. You have now experienced, firsthand, why the consultants are sweating.