Through tools like ChatGPT, generative AI has rapidly gained popularity in many industry sectors. A report by Research And Markets suggests the market will reach $51.8 Billion by 2028.
With such dynamics in the AI space, we decided to examine the topic and explore how it will impact management consultants. AskBrian’s CEO, Pavol Sikula, recently hosted an interactive webinar on this topic, discussing what GPT is good for and bad for in the consulting industry. Read below some key topics and highlights from this insightful event:
Looking back at where Generative AI started
Tools like ChatGPT are trending nowadays and familiar to everyone, but we can see more alternatives coming, which have been under development for several years.
Interestingly, while these tools seem different on the surface, all were based on the same scientific research paper by Google, published in 2017. Therefore, whether you use Google’s Bard, Bing Chat, or OpenAI ChatGPT, you should know that their foundational logic remains the same.
The impact of GPT on Consulting
Let’s look at the bigger picture and discuss which factors are important for consulting companies when considering generative AI.
Security and privacy concerns
Most consultancies are concerned with the privacy and security of using GPT in their work. They have even consequently banned using GPT services for work-related activities. We at AskBrian aim to address these concerns effectively by using native European servers over Microsoft Azure for secure data processing.
Assessing the business model impact
Depending on the product portfolio of each business, the level of impact of a Generative AI integration changes significantly. Here are the notable ways companies interpret AI and its effects on their operations:
Perceived Technology Overflow: The rapid advancements in the Generative AI space can be overwhelming for even skilled professionals to keep up with the newest technology. Businesses may therefore be uncomfortable with investing time and resources into this field.
Employee training needs: Consultants will require training to be well-versed in their AI solutions, as clients will most likely ask for your guidance or advice on how this technology can benefit them.
New Client Project Opportunities: New startups and leading consultancies seek tech partnerships with Generative AI companies. AI tools have massive potential for securing new projects and clients.
Potential to Boost Productivity: Generative AI tools can help consultants deliver better, faster results while making their jobs more enjoyable. We’ll explore this in more detail later on in this article.
What is GPT good for?
GPT tools work great for the following use cases in your management consulting role:
- Get smarter
- Develop content
- Be a better boss!
- Prepare for meetings
- Understand other better
- Boost your productivity
- Become an MS Excel wizard!
We recommend you utilize them as described below to help speed up your work and make it easier.
1. Get smarter
GPT models can generate simple, short, and valuable results for these scenarios, helping you understand topics and quickly acquire knowledge.
- Definitions: Use GPT tools to learn the meaning of terms you aren’t familiar with. Since the model is trained on extensive data from internet sources, it can concisely compile and explain most concepts.
- TLDR: You can use these tools to summarise events you need to learn more quickly. We recommend you use AI to research topics or events that are well-known and sufficiently documented on the internet.
- Differences and Similarities: You can ask for differences or similarities between two entities that have not been extensively compared. You might find interesting insights with such comparisons to deepen your understanding.
- Value Chain: You can ask for the value chain list of a company you’re researching. Since most of that data is available in the public domain, GPT can access and summarize it, helping you gather insights and save time.
- Competitors List: GPT models can generate a good set of competitors for a given company or client, especially if you specify the industry or domain of work.
- “Why..” Questions: Questions that begin with “why..” that question the reason behind an industry practice or a methodology are usually handled quite well in GPT models.
- Advantages over another competitor: Much like comparisons, GPT can give you the benefits of choosing one entity over another. This can help you distinguish between similar entities without figuring out their features yourself.
2. Develop content
Using tools like Brian or ChatGPT, you can generate content drafts for your projects in the following use cases.
- Hypotheses: Generating a hypothesis is one of the core tasks of a consultant. GPT can draft some hypotheses for you that can be validated, assessed, and further developed.
- Bullets and Questions: You can use GPT to draft bullet points for your emails and other communication pieces. You can ask questions as you’d to a colleague for advice or perspective on general topics.
- Drafting Concepts and Brainstorming: If you need help deciding what content you should create on a specific topic, ask GPT to help you develop ideas or brainstorm concepts. Its conversational intelligence can act as a “second brain” of sorts, guiding you to refine your thoughts into actionable ideas.
- Pros and Cons: Generating a topic’s pros and cons list using GPT helps you understand and explain it better to your clients. This application can be highly beneficial when presenting a topic with its upsides and downsides.
3. Be a better boss
Using GPT can give you a good perspective on handling workplace-related scenarios as a manager. Here are a few examples:
- Structure events: GPT helps you plan meetings and collaborative events better. This can come in handy when you’re leading or hosting a meeting for the first time and unsure of the best approach to take.
- Giving feedback and advice: GPT can create an approach to how you can effectively conduct difficult conversations or provide genuine advice to colleagues who may need it.
- Motivation: It can be challenging to keep your team motivated through the tedious phases of the project. GPT can provide some helpful ideas you can refine as per the nature of your team and tasks.
- What to offer: Keeping your team members happy is crucial for their long-term success. GPT can produce insightful answers on what you can provide as the manager to encourage your colleagues. Of course, you may need to evaluate those recommendations per the company policies for practicality.
4. Prepare for meetings
GPT can help you plan and prepare for group events and meetings better.
- Creating the agenda: You can ask GPT to draft an agenda for a meeting of a specific duration. You can add other details of the event to make it more personalized.
- “How-to” questions: Ask GPT “how-to” questions to execute in the meeting. It’ll help you form a structure or a meeting plan for conducting the whole event.
- Concerns and expectations: For meetings with sensitive or critical topics, ask GPT to list any disagreements that may arise so you can be prepared. This can prepare you not to be caught off-guard on tricky questions or situations.
- Best outcome: To evaluate how a successful meeting should go, GPT can give an idea of the best-case expected outcome. It can act as your compass to evaluate how the meeting went and whether the outcome you got was to be expected.
5. Understanding others
GPT can significantly help us understand one another better. Sometimes in business communication, details get lost or aren’t immediately apparent. The use cases below illustrate how GPT can help in these situations.
- Key tasks: Use GPT to understand a role and learn more about its responsibilities to provide more value to your team.
- Abbreviations: Keeping up with all the technical acronyms and industry-specific terms is often tricky. Learn more about commonly used abbreviations in your team or department.
- Key challenges: Be prepared for the challenges you’ll likely face in your new role or company by using GPT!
- “Like to hear”: This question to GPT can give you precise insights into another person’s mind. If you’re dealing with a person in a designation you aren’t familiar with yet, this information might prove useful to know.
- Meaning: If you’re coming from an important discussion with the company leadership or a client meeting and are unfamiliar with some terms and their context, enlist GPT as your assistant.
6. Be more productive
GPT tools can boost your productivity by helping you save time drafting messages, suggesting tips and best practices for handling tasks, learning more about other tools, etc. Below are a few example illustrations:
- Emails: No more staring at the blank email window, wondering how to craft your message. Draft professional emails within seconds with GPT’s natural language skills!
- Paragraphs: Let GPT write some content drafts of a topic for you. Generate quick introductions or summaries for your work and then edit them to your liking.
- ‘Hacks’: Ask for specific tips and tricks to add to your skill set. It’ll present to you in seconds what otherwise would take several minutes watching those long YouTube videos on productivity tips.
- Tools: Since hundreds of software tools are available, it can be tricky to discover some good ones by searching for them yourself. You can ask GPT about valuable tools that make your job easier and more efficient.
7. Excel in Excel
You can ask GPT for tool-specific tips for productivity and convenience, like Excel formulas for your spreadsheets.
- Excel formula: No need to browse endless forums and community threads online trying to learn spreadsheet tricks. Instantly generate a precise Excel formula for your daily tasks.
- Feature: Discover new features for your Excel cheat sheet within seconds! Make your colleagues wonder where you get all this new information from.
- Macro: Create highly specific macros to copy and paste into your work. Now that it works on your sheet, you can understand it at your own pace without worrying about the deadline.
- Troubleshooting: GPT can help you resolve any issues you face with a sheet you’re working on without searching the internet for a solution somewhere.
- Conditional format: Do you want to know how to get the exact format you envision? Ask GPT! You can take its help to understand how to use Excel’s vast conditional formatting options.
What is GPT bad for?
We discussed what GPT is good for, and there are bountiful applications for it.
Now, here are the prominent text-to-text use cases where GPT falls short (for now):
- Telling jokes
- Providing factual data with numbers or statistics
- Searching for working web links (URLs)
- Performing logic-based tasks
- File handling
- Connecting the dots for complex concepts
Telling jokes: You’ve probably seen ChatGPT fumble around and struggle to write good jokes. AI-generated jokes don’t work reliably (yet) because of a technical limitation with the current language models. When generating a response, they can only predict the following four characters, so they struggle to finish the joke cohesively with a punchline.
Providing numbers and factual data: ChatGPT has issues presenting factually accurate numbers. It often invents these metrics, which is called hallucination. There are a few ways to reduce these hallucinations, such as assigning a role to GPT by telling it through your prompt, “..you are a brilliant mathematician..”, etc. It tends to make fewer false claims in this state, but we still recommend not accepting metrics developed by an AI tool as a fact.
Searching for web links: The hallucination issues also carry over to web URLs, as ChatGPT generates seemingly legit links that do not exist. A single click on those links can verify if they’re real. It can’t give you the actual website contents either, as it can’t access the internet in real-time.
File handling: While GPT4 has become much more capable at performing logic tasks, it still does not possess any native file-handling features as of now. Users cannot ask it to generate a slide deck or assemble a report in a specific format.
Connecting the dots: GPT models can generate specific answers to your queries or give broad answers to business questions like “How do I start an agency.” But they still can’t connect these concepts of various complexities as humans do.
Generative AI with Brian
Even though thousands of AI tools are available today, the varying accessibility, feature set, privacy & security concerns, etc., make it difficult for consultants to integrate them into their work. Brian aims to give consultants a tool that encapsulates all the above good things from GPT but adds many more enhanced features.
Brian is a multifunctional AI assistant available 24×7 via Email, Teams, or Slack with a response time of only 3 minutes! We prioritize the confidentiality and integrity of all user data by processing it solely within Europe. Additionally, we are certified with GDPR and ISO 27001 to ensure the utmost security.
Brian’s skills and features
Brian has multiple talents powered by selected digital services and data sources. You can explore each category’s complete list of skills for more details.
Let’s discuss one of our newest addition to Brian’s skills – Industry Brief (beta).
Industry Brief skill
For your next client proposal, let’s say you wish to learn more about the automotive industry sector in the UK. You can ask Brian to give you more information via any communication channel, like MS Teams, as shown below:
Within minutes, Brian presents a detailed list of documents on the automotive industry KPIs for the UK.
Alongside these above details, you also get Porter’s five forces, which is a method of analyzing the operating environment of a competition of a business. This data gives you an idea of the new players in the field, competitors, and the suppliers’ & buyers’ authority over bargaining.
You also get key challenges of the industry and any massive trends to note for the foreseeable future, all within 3 minutes or less!
Why use Brian over ChatGPT?
- Server location: Brian’s servers and data are in Europe, not the USA.
- Requests not used for retraining: User prompts and data submitted to Brian are not taken for training the AI model for others to use.
- User anonymity at OpenAI: Brian shares only the user prompts at OpenAI services, not the user’s or company’s identity.
- Grounding for consultants: No need for extensive prompt engineering to get consulting-related results. We’ll do that for you automatically!
- Factual data integrations: Brian already has authentic data integration, a crucial missing element in GPT.
- Access point: Conveniently interact with Brian via multiple communication apps.
The future of consulting with AI
Adesso surveyed 500 business owners to understand how ChatGPT is used in management consulting. The survey revealed the following findings:
We believe the most significant impact would be on content development, communication, and software development support compared to qualitative research and data analytics-related uses.
For Brian, we plan to integrate more GPT-based services and upgrade the core intelligence or “brain” to make him smarter! Information from private companies will make Brian more accurate and industry-optimized, supporting your research with factual data.
Furthermore, we plan to add more incredible features like Auto-GPT, a showcase application for some GPT4 features. It can use the internet to create subtasks and continually function until stopped.
Conclusion
While GPT-powered tools can enhance your management consulting work, they lack Brian’s security and privacy features. They’re not optimized for the management consulting industry, so it might take more ingenuity to get these tools to understand your needs as a consultant better. Brian’s features are designed from the ground up to cut down repetitive, menial tasks, helping you focus on solving complex problems without dealing with mundane duties such as basic research, preparing slides, reports, etc.
Do you want to learn more about how Brian can accelerate your consulting business?
Book a free demo, and we will be happy to talk.