‘Tell me what you can build’: AI boom turns into gold rush for consultants

After ChatGPT came out in 2022, the marketing team at Reckitt Benckiser, which makes Dettol and Mortein, was convinced that artificial intelligence technology could help its business. But the team was uncertain how, so it turned to Boston Consulting Group for help.

IBM, which has 160,000 consultants, has secured more than $US1 billion in sales commitments related to generative AI for consulting work and its watsonx system, which can be used to build and maintain AI models. Accenture, which provides consulting and technology services, booked $US300 million in sales last year.

Generative AI sales are helping the industry find growth after a post-pandemic lull. The management consulting industry in the United States is expected to collect $US392.2 billion in sales this year, up 2 per cent from a year ago, according to IBISWorld, a research firm. Other programs from IBM have shown more promise. The company worked with Dun & Bradstreet, a business data provider, to develop a generative AI system to analyse and provide advice on selecting suppliers. The tool, called Ask Procurement, will allow employees to conduct detailed searches with specific parameters. For example, it could find memory chip suppliers that are minority owned and automatically create a request for proposals for them.

Because the viability of the chatbot was uncertain and McKinsey had limited experience with the relatively new technology, the firm did the work as a “joint experiment” under its contract with ING, said Bahadir Yilmaz, chief analytics officer at ING. The bank paid McKinsey for the work, but Yilmaz said that many consultants were willing to do speculative work with generative AI without pay because they wanted to demonstrate what they could do with the new technology.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

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