AI Transformation: Is the Consulting Career Model Breaking Down? | Dr. C.J. Meadows | S1E5

AI isn't changing how consultants work, it's redefining what it means to be a consultant. Welcome to Alt Consulting Conversations, where we explore how consulting is being reinvented for the AI era. Each episode brings together leaders who have seen this transformation from every side, as consultants, educators, and innovators shaping what's next to come. My guest today is Dr. Cj Meadows, one of Asia's top 10 women in IT and head of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at SP School of Global Management, a Forbes Top 20 International Business School. She is the head of Global MBA program for consulting management. Doctor's work sits at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and design thinking. She is an author, speaker, and a passionate innovator with 25 years of experience across Asia, Europe, and North America. Doctor, it's such a pleasure to have you on All Consulting Conversations.

It is lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

You sit at the intersection of innovation, consulting, and education. So how do you see AI changing the consulting industry itself?

You know, even deeper than that, I sit at the intersection of technology, design, and business strategy. And what we're seeing now is that new technologies, as they usually do, enable new strategies. New business models, totally new capabilities. And we need to design for that, not only the business models, but the offerings.

Right. And when you, when you're leading the Consulting Management Program at SP Jain, shaping the next generation of consultants, how are these students being taught differently today, given the lot of changes we have seen in terms of AI coming in, doing the work which junior consultants used to do? Quite differently. So what new skills, in your opinion, have become essential? And which traditional ones, if I may say so, are losing a bit of relevance?

You know, we particularly train and— no, even more, training is education to do the thing you were trained to do. So we've been shifting more and more towards real education, really focusing on helping people learn how to learn. Do completely new things. We are helping people learn a lot of AI skills, which at its core, at the front end and the back end, is asking really good questions, which was never as much— it didn't receive as much attention in education earlier, and evaluating what comes back. Now, you'll need some experience, some heuristics, some judgment in order to evaluate, And, you know, if, if companies are not hiring junior consultants, problem is how are they going to develop the, the judgment, they get the experience, all that sort of stuff. So we're stepping in to give them experience with real projects, real companies, you know, like UBS, Google, Microsoft, Dell, all kinds of folks so that they get the AI tools. They learn how to frame the problems and ask the right questions, how to evaluate the results and refine them, how to present those well so that what they're saying is compelling. And part of what I do in particular in design thinking and innovation is help them learn to listen.

When you work with them and, and your students who have just joined the MBA program, or those who might have just graduated, what kind of career shifts are you seeing? You know, there are people who want to become consultant, but the route to partnership has changed a bit, uh, you know. And as you are saying that you are teaching them new skills on how to frame the problem, so what are some questions that you're hearing from students, and what are the career shifts that you're seeing?

Well, big question on everybody's mind right now is, am I going to be able to get a job A lot of companies are not hiring at the junior level, or at least not as much as they were. So, you know, and, and a lot of people might think, okay, I need more qualifications and better grades so that I can compete doing what we've always done. And I think that's always a bad idea, a losing idea. You compete by not competing, by offering something new and different, something unique that people actually want. I am also seeing a lot of interest in students who want to learn consulting skills but want to go into traditional corporations because basically they need to be consultants internally. A lot of companies don't want to spend the big dollars on those consulting projects, but they want their people to act like consultants. A lot of people are wanting to become entrepreneurs or scale up their family businesses. A lot of them also wind up becoming solopreneurs or consulting founders themselves, and some of those using AI and other, other tools like Agentic AI too.

When I sort of— I'll move on to companies now. So you're telling about, you know, companies are hiring for different skills. They are looking for consulting knowledge within their organization, not necessarily outsource it to a consulting service provider. But when you look at consulting firms themselves, and you have worked at Accenture, how do you see AI? Because there is an argument which people are making that, hey, AI is just a productivity tool. You know, yes, it's sustaining innovation. We have seen a lot of these changes. We had Excel Macros. We had, you know, once upon a time, OHPs, which moved to PowerPoint slides. So AI is one more productivity tool, and that's absolutely right to say in certain consulting practices. But in others, you might argue that, hang on, it's not just a productivity tool, but it might be something more profound. It might challenge the core operating model, the business model of the company. What are your thoughts on that?

You know, I had an old friend who was a partner at BCG. And he said to me a few years back, you know, things have really, really changed. You know who's our top competitor now? I'm like, McKinsey, Bain, you know, the usual suspects. He said, Google. Oh, wait, wait, wait, what? Why? He said, you know, it used to be our bread and butter was the market study. So we would send minimum 3 people out for minimum a month. And I will not tell you the price that he quoted me, but it was pretty significant. And he said, now there's so much information sloshing around that clients themselves can go get it themselves using Google and other tools. So I think what we're seeing is that AI, and especially GenAI and soon AgenticAI, are enabling clients to do some things themselves. However, they won't necessarily be asking the right questions. They won't necessarily understand what the problem is or that they have the problem wrong. That was a key skill in the old days in consulting, to sit down with a client and not take the assignment from them where they tell us what they want us to do. Our job is to understand the situation and say, okay, here is what we advise you to do. So what we're seeing is less of the old-style consulting and more helping people think, helping people be aware of what can be in their business, helping people reach out to various experts. You're going to see consultants used for a lot more than they used to be used for.

Correct. And I can vouch for what you're saying. I had a conversation with a client where the kind of work they were trying to get done was something they could have done easily themselves by writing a few prompts. So I asked the client partner there and I said, why are you looking at hiring me? Like, you know, this is something that you could do. And we had a longstanding relationship. He said, I'm not trained as a consultant. I know my business, but maybe I'll pay $20 for ChatGPT license and do some prompts. But who knows, am I asking the right questions or not? Who knows if I have covered all the bases? I'm looking at all the possible lenses which you do. So it's much easier for me to work with someone who knows how to apply the consulting toolkit and get the answers. Yeah, I've heard that. Bang on. But when you sort of You know, in the book I have mentioned about different kind of companies which are trying to come up, and there is no clear answer right now on what might succeed going forward. You might have solo consulting firms, you might have a lot of firms which are top-heavy with the, you know, junior consultants being replaced by AI as an ops layer. You might have productized strategy platforms, expert networks, and so on and so forth. But these firms are essentially innovating the consulting business model. So from your experience in the field of innovation, what advice would you give to these young companies which are coming up and trying to do something new?

Number one, understand that there is room for all of these players that you outlined in your book. All right. You really need to understand what is it that you're doing that's of value? How really are you helping? What's the need that you're fulfilling? Also, Whenever something disruptive is going on, it usually starts at the bottom of the market. Usually consultants don't want to go to the bottom of the market. They want to go straight to the top and be McKinsey walking into a big boardroom. But there's less need for that, and if you're alone, uh, how are you going to get up there? The real question is, as a consultant, how can you help people who couldn't afford the help or were just priced out of the market, or, or could afford the help but they really aren't getting any value from it because they're overspending. So not only do you need to understand why are you unique, but why are you— who are you really helping with what? And just as you did, ask them, well, why do you need me?

Yeah, it becomes— and you sort of hear a lot of interesting things from clients because suddenly they'll talk about a thing which you never thought of. You know, I've heard people talking about, we have a rigid— you have a rigid model, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, I can't work under that pressure. The clients who say, this is all great, but who will do the execution? It's a long-drawn execution. Who will help me do, you know, transform the behavior change which might be required in my organization? So yeah. Those conversations.

And you know, also, so the execution, even if you're in a small boutique firm, you may not be able to do that, but you could certainly give them guidance and you can connect them with people in your network who you know you can tap on and they need your network. See, it used to be that you'd hire a consulting firm for the brand name. But now we're seeing a lot of independents and tech firms. Expertise, that's still there and it's augmented with AI. Independence, okay, anybody can do that. Temp workforce, okay. And connected to the brand name is I need somebody to walk into the boardroom and say, well, you know, thus-and-so firm said my strategy is good, so please approve my budget. So again, what are the levers that you're pressing? What, what value are you providing? And don't be greedy. Make sure you're providing a lot more value than you're actually keeping.

Right. And when you mentioned about ideas which new companies could focus on and how they can get insights from interactions with clients, it reminded me of your book, you know, famous Business Fusions. Thank you. Because I was flipping through it and the book The core idea is there are so many ideas which come from unlikely industries, like the Kingfisher Beak-inspired bullet train and Apple and Corning and so on and so forth. So if you look at all these different ideas, it's very difficult for a new company to figure out how you can disrupt consulting industry, which is set in a particular way for decades. And how do you focus on those clients which are maybe not traditional consumer of consulting services and would want that kind of support? But any ideas from the book which people can look at, any source of inspiration they can have to think about new ways to solve client problems in this space?

You know, if you look at all kinds of disruptions and fusions, you know, go looking. If you're trying to set up a new consulting firm, go look at other industries that have been disrupted and find out, okay, what's the model there? Could— can you Uberize consulting or any other disruptor that you can name? How can you take the ideas from elsewhere and put them into your situation? Innovation itself, you know, start small with a pilot project, get yourself an MVP, and then scale up once you really have something that's profitable, etc. And don't be afraid to go in with an inferior product. Inferior products win. That's how disruption starts at the bottom of the market, and then it eats its way up.

So if I'm an aspiring student who wants to pursue MBA in consulting, what advice would you give me? Because I might come with all those questions on, hey, I'm reading so many reports and consulting firms are firing people, there are new companies coming, is it the right career choice for me, and how do I stay relevant? So, and maybe lead the next wave of consulting, you know, the new shape and form it takes. So what would you guide students who are thinking of pursuing an MBA in consulting?

You know, I'd say the skills you learn in consulting are good for so many situations. So if you want to be an innovator and a changemaker and ultimately a leader of a company, you need to know how to find needs, diagnose problems, put together projects, and do all that stuff that consultants do. you know, and keep the relationships going and build up into more and more work. How to lead team— all the consulting skills help you in traditional consulting firms, uh, basically being a consultant within a big company, and as an entrepreneur, whether you set up a consulting business or you set up another kind of a business. It's the skills that matter.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So if you— and you know, we talk, we are talking about disruption, and it takes a lot of time to disrupt these industries which are well established. But if we fast forward and go into 2035 and look back at what happened, you know, in, in the 2020s with AI coming in, you know, very quickly we had different models of GenAI to agentic AI God knows who, what comes after a few years. What do you think industry, the consulting industry, would have learned from this meta change which has happened?

I think it should learn that there's room for many different models, many different players, and all of the SMEs who have been excluded over the years and yet are 70% of everybody's economy, as well as all the startups, etc. All these folks need access to humans and/or digital twins who can help them think through their situation and work something through, work on something, guide them with a consulting mindset. And make no mistake, AI and humans think very differently. The sort of thing that you just held up in the book, whereby the people I talk about in there combine vastly different ideas and industries and technologies, nations, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of lateral thinking and lateral creativity you don't currently find in AI, and I don't know how soon you would be able to see it. AI doesn't physically go into situations and talk to humans and diagnose what seems to be the problem. You can work with an AI that way, but make no mistake, you're kind of still feeding it, even if it's asking you good questions. So yeah, there's value in tech, there's value in humans. Learn how to use them both.

Finally, the last question that I have is, what ideas from the book resonated most with you?

Damn, a lot of it resonated with me. I think most importantly is that consulting itself is being disrupted and we need to be providing advice, guidance, and help, i.e., consulting, to those who've never had access to it before. You know, there's so many people who go out into not-for-profit situations or situations where there are no organizations and there are no markets, and that's the kind of skill you need as consultant. Go where nobody has gone and, and create something new and good.

That's a wonderful thought. Thank you, Dr. Cj Meadows. That was really a fascinating conversation. What I take away is the key point around you have now an opportunity of a lifetime to go and find those new markets which were underserved SMEs, wherever there was non-consumption of consulting, with solid problem solving to help everyone prosper and grow. So for listeners, you can explore more about Dr. Cj Meadows' work at the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at SP Jain School of Global Management and find related ideas in my upcoming book, Alt Consulting. Doctor, thank you once again for joining me today.

Thank you. And by the way, it's a terrific book. Everybody interested in consulting should read this book.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.