Ryan Wall is Technical Lead at DATA³, with a career built across data engineering, data management, analytics and data science. Before joining DATA³, he held senior data leadership roles at Imagine Cruising, ProjectiveGroup, Computacenter and Foundation SP: giving him a close-up view of how organisations actually make decisions, not just how they say they do. In this piece, Ryan looks at what AI really means for the consulting industry, and why he thinks the value of consulting was never really about having the answers.
I’ve been thinking recently about what AI does to the consulting industry.
Most of the conversation seems to revolve around productivity.
- Will consultants write documents faster?
- Will proposals be generated automatically?
- Will workshops be summarised?
- Will analysis become cheaper?
Maybe…
But I suspect that’s the least interesting part of what’s happening. The consulting industry has always had a slightly awkward relationship with outcomes.
Clients Want Results. They Usually Get Advice.
Clients buy expertise because they want a better result. What they usually receive is advice.
Sometimes that’s exactly what is needed… Sometimes it isn’t.
I’ve sat through enough steering committees over the years to know that organisations rarely fail because nobody knew what to do.
More often they fail because they couldn’t agree what was true.
Finance had one number, Operations had another, Sales had a third.
Three intelligent people. Three different answers. An expensive argument.
The consultant’s job was often to step into the middle, untangle the mess and create enough confidence for a decision to be made.
We called it data strategy. Or transformation. Or operating model design.
But underneath it all, we were really helping organisations make decisions.
Why AI Is a Bigger Challenge for Consulting Than People Realise
That’s why I think AI creates a much bigger challenge for consulting than many people realise.
For decades there was a comfortable separation of responsibilities.
- Consultants advised.
- Technology teams built.
- Operations executed.
- Governance reviewed.
Everyone had their place.
AI doesn’t seem particularly interested in those boundaries.
A system can now read a document, compare it to a policy, identify exceptions, draft a recommendation, route it for approval and record the outcome.
Where exactly does consulting start and stop in that process?
I’m not sure the old answer works anymore.
Where the Value Shifts
The firms that thrive over the next decade may not be the ones that produce the smartest presentations.
They may be the ones that become experts in organisational intelligence.
- Helping clients find evidence faster.
- Helping them trust it.
- Helping them make decisions with less friction.
- Helping them understand the consequences.
Because if an AI can generate the recommendation, the value shifts somewhere else.
It shifts to judgement, to accountability, To knowing when the recommendation is wrong.
And perhaps that’s where consulting was heading all along.
Not towards being the people with the answers.
Towards being the people who help organisations think more clearly.
How We Think About This at DATA³
That is also how we are starting to think about our work at DATA³.
The relationship with a client cannot just be: tell us your problem, we will build the thing, then everyone hopes the organisation changes around it.
That has always felt too thin.
The better relationship is more involved than that.
It means understanding how decisions are really made.
Where evidence is trusted, and where it is quietly ignored.
Where people are waiting for better information, and where better information already exists but never reaches the moment of decision.
That is the space we are interested in.
- Sometimes that means a data platform.
- Sometimes it means analytics.
- Sometimes it means AI inside a workflow.
- Sometimes it means helping a leadership team realise the issue was never the technology at all.
For us, data and AI are not the end product.
They are how you shorten the distance between knowing something and doing something useful with it.
That is where we think the next generation of consulting relationships will be built.
If AI can generate the recommendation, where does your organisation’s judgement actually sit, and who’s accountable when it’s wrong? That’s the conversation worth having before AI forces it on you. Book a consultation with DATA³ and let’s work out where the gap sits in yours.
