The AI Shifts Every Consultant Needs to Understand

Welcome to Startup with Feras. Thank you for tuning in. This is episode number 99, so I appreciate you tuning in. What is new in the world of entrepreneurship? We're talking about AI, and we're talking about the AI shifts that every new And small consultant needs to understand. I've been in Silicon Valley for nearly 30, 30 years, and I've gone through a whole lot of tech waves. Each one of them over the last 30 years, I've survived a couple and then later learned how to thrive through these waves. And most recently, I've been doing a lot of analysis on exactly how the titans of the consulting industry, the McKinseys, the Deloittes, the PwCs, and others are actually adapting to AI. And more importantly, I've been breaking down what these shifts mean for the new smaller and growing consulting businesses that don't have the dollars and the resources that these big and these titans have. And I, I hear this from consultants. Um, there's a concern, there's a fear. It's a legitimate fear, but everyone is concerned. They look at ChatGPT, they look at Claude, at Gemini, and these other AI agents, and they're asking themselves, will AI replace me? So it's a concern, it's a fear, it's a legitimate concern, but the real risk isn't AI itself. The real risk is becoming the type of consultant that AI will replace first. So I want to show you some numbers, I want to show some stats, I want to give you some, um, not just a mindset, actually specific steps you can take as a consultant, as someone with 3, 4, 5 years of experience, 10 years of experience, 15+ years of experience, how to pivot how to take advantage of these shifts that are taking place so that you thrive. You, um, you serve— not only survive, you thrive with AI. Let's see, make sure the tech is okay here. It looks like— all right, so, um, yeah, we had actually— camera is on now, so we should be good. All right. So, so, so let's look at some struggling reality check. McKinsey recently revealed that their firm is made of— made up 40,000 humans and 20,000 AI agents. And then I believe it was the head of McKinsey who said that he expects every employee, every consultant to be enabled by at least one agent within the next 12 to 18 months. So they're not thinking people against AI, they're thinking people with AI. At the same time, if you look at other industry trends or analysis and what they're predicting about consultants and the consulting space, Some of these predictions are that AI could displace up to 25% of traditional, say, management consultants, and making especially— making it the toughest job market for generalists and also for new junior consultants. So what these big companies are doing, they're focusing a lot on the client-facing consultants, they're focusing on specialization, they're also understanding that AI is commoditizing exactly what consultants have been known for, for ages, and these consultants used to charge a premium for that, which is you synthesize data, You build reports, you build frameworks, you do analysis, you develop strategies, and that might have taken weeks, months for global companies, and now you can do it in hours and days with AI. So if your consulting business is built on charging your clients for those basic tasks, which are now basic, in the past maybe they weren't, you're in the crosshairs. But if you learn how to pivot, how to leverage AI to run your boutique, your small agency, you can punch way above your weight. Now, I'm not saying that you use AI blindly. We'll talk about all this later in this session. I'd love to hear from you, those of you who are joining live. Leave me a question, leave me a comment, let me know your experience with how you're using AI in your business, what you're seeing your clients are struggling with. And also, if you have any questions just in general about business, about entrepreneurship, that is what, um, I'm here for, um, to help you start, grow, and scale your consulting business. A lot of people helped me along the way. Struggled a lot when I started my very first business. Didn't know how to sell, didn't know how to find clients, didn't know how to how to manage people in a small company environment. And after the initial struggle, a year or two into it, my co-founder and I figured it out. And it took us a while, but we did reach 7 figures. Later, we grew the business. We focused on analytics. We niched down. We brought that business to 8 figures. And later, we sold it then to the global media giant. And along the way, this is now my 7th venture, and mostly in consulting. So, so I'm here to help you start, scale— start, grow, and scale your consulting business without having to go through all the mistakes I've, I've gone through, and also the mistakes I've, I've learned— I've learned about and, and heard from consultants that I advise and that I work with. But today, again, the focus is on AI. But if you have a different question or something related to a challenge you have in your business, leave me a comment. I'll make sure to get back to you. And if it's something private, you're not sure you want to put it out there in the world, you haven't told your significant other, or you haven't told your boss in your job that you're leaving, you're about to start a business, so you can email me. Email me at info@startupwithferas.com. Feras, spelled F-E-R-A-S, like my first name. And I read all these emails and I reply to them and I keep it confidential. So if you have a general comment, leave it here on the YouTube channel or on whichever platform you're on, and I'll be more than happy to add— to address. So today I'll be covering 3 areas you must master as a smaller, as a new consultant. One area is using AI to deliver your services better and faster, helping to— helping your clients actually implement AI because companies are struggling. I'll go over the details of this in a little bit. And then 3, using AI in your own back office, in your own company, even though it's just maybe you and yourself and maybe no co-founder yet. And you still have things that you are, you are likely to be doing manually, and there's things that you can do and adopt today that will help you run your business more efficiently. So, so we'll get into it right away, and again, if you have any comment or question, don't hesitate to leave it. I'll be more than happy to answer it. So, so the big— again, I'm using the research that I've done on the big consulting firms to learn from those, what they're doing, and not to say that everything big companies do is applicable to small companies in the consulting space, but historically, whether it was the CRM revolution 20 years ago maybe, whether it's the big data revolution, whether it's the mobile revolution, whether it's the digital transformation and analytics and and all that good stuff, all these tech waves, these big companies, they validate what is a fad versus what is a trend. So when Salesforce and other CRM systems became a thing and companies, I remember the logo on Salesforce was no software. They had that very famous logo. When SaaS, software as a service, was a new thing at the time, a lot of companies hesitated, but when these big consulting companies built teams of consultants to help companies adopt CRMs and software like Salesforce, they validated that trend, and then after those big companies handled the Fortune 100 and the Fortune 5,000, the Fortune 500 and maybe the Fortune 1,000, there was still a whole lot of business to be had by the smaller agencies who specialized in CRM and who went out and built very successful agencies, consulting agencies working with smaller, small and mid-sized businesses. So to the extent that we can learn and apply and understand some of the rationale behind what the decisions that these big companies are making. To the extent that we can learn it and then take things from it that are applicable to smaller consultancies and new consultants, we should. And again, I'll— I've looked through it, and then I'm going to specifically address it from the AI angle that we are focusing on today. It looks like we have a couple of comments. Check. Hello, so this is Nihal. Nihal, thank you for joining. I appreciate it. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to answer, but I appreciate you being with us here with me today on this live stream. So first of all, let's start by looking at some of the shifts that sort of serve as a massive warning, but they also have a massive benefit to the smaller consultant. This era of— the era of a generalist, for example, strategy consultant, you come in and you don't have any specialization in the client vertical, and maybe you don't have any specialization in their company size, and you come in and say, I'm a management consultant, and I can come in and work with your team and develop a strategy and disappear for a couple weeks, come back, or for a month, come back and say, okay, now here's the invoice for $25,000. That era is gone, definitely. Clients no longer want to pay for general advice. Clients are looking for specialized domain experts who can come in and add value beyond what they can prompt from AI themselves. So to the extent that you can look at your experience, look at the verticals you worked in, look at maybe horizontally also like what departments, what areas did you work with? Did you work in healthcare in marketing? Did you work in hospitality with— in IT? So identify verticals and segments and company sizes where you have most of your experience, most of those skills, and that will start helping you position yourself as this niche consultant. You're not a generalist. You want to be more of a niche. As a matter of fact, I forget if it was McKinsey or Deloitte. It was a Harvard— no, it was a Harvard Business Review Review article that I read where they were describing how the traditional pyramid for consultants, that's their operator model. You hire a lot of junior people who would do a lot of that legwork. They work 80 hours a week, 90 hours a week. They do all this research, all the reports, they synthesize data, and they present the deck to the senior partner who would come in and pitch this or deliver this strategy. strategy after adding their own 2 cents, of course, to it, and their experience and their expertise obviously is important, the senior folks, that is. So they relied, these consulting companies, they relied heavily on armies of junior consultants. So that article from actually the Harvard Business School, it says that pyramid model is changing to more of an oblique model. So it's, it's a thinner structure. If you've seen that, some of the monuments, right? It's just instead of a pyramid, it's a thinner structure where you have a lot of specialized knowledge and smaller teams. So, so companies want you to come in as a specialist in their vertical, in their company size, in their challenges that their company is facing, and want you to contribute to that and and be there to help. So that is one thing, sort of moving from a generalist consultant to be more of a niche consultant. That's one thing. The other thing is the operating model or the pricing model. So a lot of these big companies traditionally, they would bill hourly. So the junior consultant would be at $200, the senior consultant, at $350, the partner would be at $500, whatever numbers work in whichever market. So that billable hour model is also shifting. And again, I'm not suggesting you as a new consultant, you change your business model, your pricing model today. I have actually a full video promoting hourly pricing for new consultants. And I'm a big believer of hourly consulting for hourly pricing for new consultants, and I go over why I stand behind that position in that video. So check it out, I'll show it to you on the channel in a bit. But, um, but, but what these— what, what I want you to, to think about is as you're growing your business, as you're evolving, as you're facing competition, that hourly model might not be the right— that hourly pricing model might not be the most effective model for you to pitch your services. So this is what I'm recommending. Now let me go over some of the details. Now why are these big companies moving away from billing hourly? Because in the past, again, as I said, they would have the junior consultants do all this work, all this research. It might take them 40 hours. They would bill for 40 hours. If you can do that same work in 4 hours, if AI can do that in 4 hours, even with the back and forth prompting and tweaking, then it doesn't make sense to bill for 40 hours. Clients are not going to pay you for 40 hours for something that can be done with AI in 4 hours. So McKinsey and others, they've shifted roughly a quarter of their revenue to outcome-based pricing. So they tie, they might have a base price or some fixed amount, but then at a certain level, when the outcomes are achieved, when these goals are met, then there is— they're paid. You can hear— you can call this performance-based pricing. I like that model as actually as a customer, if I'm buying a service from a contractor, I'd like to give them a base amount and also another part that is paid based on performance. This way our interest, our incentives are aligned. So keep that in mind. Initially, if you're just starting out, I think hourly is okay based on some scope of work and you keep the client aware of a range of hours. I think these are good tactics to use if you're using hourly, but you might start hearing, you're getting some pushback from clients where they're saying, why is this taking this long? I can do this myself. I can do this with AI. I can get an intern and they can prompt and get this strategy. So you might want to start thinking about how to package your services based on a fixed fee or performance-based pricing and tie that to outcomes. If your job is an HR— let's say you're an HR consultant, and you know that space really well, and you know you work well with mid-sized companies, they don't have a VP of HR or a Chief People Officer, CPO, or they just don't have that infrastructure, and you can come in and help them implement the right software to hire, to onboard, performance review, all that good stuff, you can have a software and a process around it, So if you do that today, you and you charge hourly, they might challenge that, the clients might challenge that and say, you know, we have, we can do a lot of this stuff ourselves, we can buy the software that can do virtual interviews, and we can have an agent, AI agent does all this interviewing for us, and they can match the resumes against the job description, and filter out those that don't match. And people can question this because you see all this, what I call, or what is called as applied AI. There are a lot of software solutions out there in HR, in IT, in marketing, in process automation. So you as an HR consultant, to keep that example, you have to come in and potentially you could be challenged to not bill hourly, but to say, I will take care of these outcomes. I will work with you closely to make sure you have a, a solid onboarding system, a solid hiring process, a set of processes, a solid onboarding system. And then I have— I have those, those would be, those would be the, um, the outcomes. You can even go a step further and you can help Help them if you are working strategically with them, maybe on some sort of retainer. There could be some long-term goals in terms of measuring employee retention, so you can tie maybe some extra bonus based on achieving certain outcomes. So keep that in mind. 2 things here. One is that we talked about the operating model and billing hourly, and the second thing is that area that being being a specialist, not a generalist. So, so, so stop selling time, focus on selling outcomes, or tie, tie the— tie what you do, the benefits of your services, of your knowledge, tie that to outcomes that are important to clients. And the second thing is focus, focus on things that AI cannot do. And this is something from McKinsey's CEO Bob Stempfels, he— I think that's how you pronounce his last name— he said that AI models cannot or don't aspire and they don't have judgment. So setting a bold vision for a company, if you're a management consultant, a leadership consultant, you can work with a CEO or the C-suite to help them set a bold vision. You can help train people on, on change management. It's hard for people to change. You can train people on how to do critical thinking, uh, that's to have critical thinking. That is something that is going to be more needed as we move into AI being part of almost every other workflow in a company. So, so clients, companies will need people who can have better judgment, people who have better critical thinking skills, people who have better communication skills, and of course everything to do with human communication and human support, that's going to be important. So these are areas you can think of, you can know your domain, you can specialize in your domain, you can specialize in a specific sector of your domain, you can niche in a specific part of of the company, whether it's IT, operations, marketing, and then you can examine the way you want to price your services going forward. So those are some things to think about for that first bullet that I mentioned. It is on how you can leverage AI to sell, to position yourself and to sell your services. Now the other part on potential revenue streams, I think this is, this is a huge revenue stream for consultants, is— and again, for those of you who are live with us, we are talking about AI and we're talking about the shifts that are happening that every new and, and small consultancy and potentially those who are growing and struggling to grow the business, those shifts that are needed and must be understood and applied by consultants. And I'd love to hear from you your own experiences, what you're hearing from the clients, what is it that you're doing to stay relevant, because the idea here is not to be replaced by AI, it's to leverage AI to help us do things more efficiently and also to be better positioned as a consultant. So the second point here, the second part is on new revenue streams and how you can help clients implement AI. And again, from my analysis of what these big consulting companies are doing and from the research is that a lot of clients are— a lot of organizations are adopting AI, okay? No surprise there, but they're not crushing it with AI. They're not seeing— some of them are not seeing bottom line improvements. So some of the data shows that 73% of consultants, they identify as the biggest shift, and many, many companies are seeing pilots of AI being deployed. Maybe the marketing department is using AI to derive content from like one white paper that the technical team has produced. Marketing can take that white paper and turn it into different assets, a carousel, a video script, a set of a series of blog posts. So you might see pockets of AI being deployed in organizations, But a lot of the companies, the big ones that have sort of gone, have massive budgets to invest in AI, they're not seeing system-wide application and benefit of using AI. So a lot of what you hear is that the technology is ready. Okay, yes, there are issues with AI. AI can hallucinate, so you have to have a human in the process in there, but the technology for certain functions within the organization is, is ready, but the organizations themselves are absolutely not because they're stick in the— they're stuck in these pilot modes. You have pockets of application or implementation of AI, but not a system-wide, system-wide adoption. And one of the articles I read, it says that in the past, you can— it might have taken 2 weeks to generate an analysis of a contract or maybe even produce a contract, a 30-page contract on a B2B enterprise-wide system, 6-figure contract or 7-figure contract. Today you can generate this contract in minutes, in an hour, but if it still has to wait in line for 2 weeks to be reviewed by an attorney, then all the efficiency that we have gained from producing a contract in minutes, those efficiencies are underutilized or underleveraged and they're wasted because now the process of reviewing documents hasn't changed. So while companies might be adopting AI in certain functions, they haven't analyzed, they haven't reviewed their processes, their workflows. So you can't use a workflow that was produced 5 years ago with a cutting-edge technology, and this is the same thing. Again, we've seen this with CRMs, we've seen this with big data, we've seen this with the marketing team is leveraging data. I remember because we had a couple of companies in that space, and I still have the company that's based out of Dubai where the marketing team is gun-ho, all in on data and understanding marketing data, but to understand the full picture of marketing and the customer journey, you have to somehow connect that marketing data set with the backend data set from your CRM, from, you know, with your customers, with your email list, so you can segment your messaging proper, address the buyers from the non-buyers, address the repeat customers from the first-timers, so if there's no connection between the different datasets and the people working on these datasets in these different departments, then you can't really maximize or even start tapping into the potential of what this data, these datasets can do once they're integrated together. And the same thing, again, this is from, I think I saw this problem back in 2012. When analytics was— marketing analytics was becoming a thing, and then fast forward 10 years, even till now, some organizations still struggle with integrating data and tech. So in AI, it's the same sort of pattern, and now you add the complexity of people can potentially be using different systems, different AI agents, different, different, um, they might be using, you know, things that are not yet, you know, within what IT has approved. So you as a consultant, the reason I'm saying all of these issues that organizations have is that all these problems, all these issues that companies have, these are opportunities for you as a consultant to come in and help them make sure they're using AI to the max within your field of experience. So again, this is not just about software development or about just marketing and repurposing content. It's about your area. So I used HR consulting as an example. Let's use another example. Let's talk about someone who is into cybersecurity, and cybersecurity is expected to continue to do well from a job market perspective. and also from a consulting perspective, companies need guardrails for their employees, for the use of data, for the protection of the data, for how and where they store data. They want to have protection against hacking, all that good stuff. So if you are an IT consultant, and again, you are a niche consultant, let's say you work with healthcare, you understand about personal information, HIPAA information, and and you are SOC 2 compliant and, and you know all that good, good stuff about healthcare and all the, all the— you have all the certifications and you understand that space very well. So your companies or that your potential clients, your target audience might be struggling, likely to be struggling implementing AI in their environment. So you can come in as an IT consultant with the AI know-how and you can make recommendations for what AI solutions they can apply. You can make recommendations for how they, what their most maybe challenging use cases. You can provide solutions for that. You can provide documentation on guardrails they should have around data access, data storage, data transfer. You can also have come in and do workshops to train and help with this adoption. Remember, technology is one part of it, probably 10%. We used to say the 10/90 rule, the Pareto rule, um, 70/30 or 80/20 or 90/10. A lot of people and a lot of companies spend a whole lot of money on technology, and then they put little money on, on adoption and on teaching their people, allowing people, budgeting for people to learn, budgeting time and money for their people to learn that technology and create processes to leverage that technology. So, so you as an IT consultant, our example here, you can come in not just implement a— do a project, but you can be there to guide on how this company can leverage AI to achieve its outcomes from a security perspective, from a, again, compliance perspective, from ease of use perspective. So whatever makes the C-suite don't sleep at night, you're there. Your job is to solve that problem for them. So think about in your area, in your area of specialization, in your area of— in your niche, what organizational changes are happening and how you can go in and support these companies through this change management or through this change that they're going through. So it's not again about tech. AI is tech and tech is important, but it is in a way rewiring the organization to use AI properly and to use it while again safety, security all that good stuff, um, are in place. So again, think of, of your— in, in this case, so initially the first point was about— the first part was on you using AI to deliver certain services, and we talked about the operational model. The second point here, the second part is on helping companies adopt AI. And again, focus on your niche, focus on companies in your vertical. And the last part here is in— that I want to cover is that I want you to also examine your own operation. Although you might be about to start a business or you just started and you're struggling, you still have subsystems, you still have some processes. So We talked about using AI to deliver a service to your client, but what else that is taking you time today? If you're doing invoices manually, okay, use tech, use QuickBooks or whatever system your friendly accountant will tell you to use, right? That's— there's no AI there. But if you're doing things manually, if you're doing Let's say you're in, in, in the content, um, generation space. You are a, you are a content creator or you provide consulting, uh, to content creators. And let's say I saw this, this amazing use case. I think it was with Claude Cowork. Someone had hundreds of, of, of a directory of hundreds of files and all these files were images. And they want to produce and deliver these images to the client, but all these images had some random names, right? Like X1, X2, X3, X, you know, 001. So they created this with Cowork, with Claude Cowork. They had it come in and they give it access to this specific directory and asked it to review all these images and then provide every file a name, a meaningful name based on what's in, in the file. And then I was just— one example on, on using some of the latest tech, uh, to make your own process more efficient. If you do a lot of manual things, let's say you go to a marketing event. I remember I went to an event, a networking event, and I had like 10 business cards, so I took a picture of them and I asked AI to Put them on it. Put those put all that information: first name, last name, address, email, phone number in in a spreadsheet. In the old days, we used to have those scanners for business cards. So so now it did it actually. It wasn't bad. It did it probably with like ninety percent accuracy. So so that saved me thirty minutes, right? So think of every function you have, and as you as you start building your business, as you have employees. You want to— you want to— you don't have to be like cutting edge, like applying the latest technologies. Not everyone is like— some of us are like that, some of us like to dabble with every new thing, but you don't want to be a laggard in the consulting space. People hire you because of your expertise, people hire you because of your know-how, and, and, and they want to hear from you about the latest and the greatest, what's happening in the industry. They rely on you. So if you are very good at what you do and you know your technical domain really well, but you're not staying up to speed on the new developments in your space, that will not make you stand out. That will not make you the consultant that people want to work with. So look for ways to be very efficient in your processes, whether it's in the back office, in, in, um, like the example I gave you, or it could be in something like in proposal and generating proposals, in creating case studies. Of course, in marketing and content generation, content marketing, there are a lot of use cases where you can, you can start brainstorming and document all the success you've had, and, and, and you can bring in problems that you solved and how you solve them, and you can feed all of that into AI and then ask it. And again, I'm using AI here— ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini— they all, for, for non-specialized users, um, I think they'll do the job very well. But you have to give it context. You have to give it who the potential client is, who the ideal client profile, the avatar, who is it that you're targeting. Also the style of voice, the tone, the way you like to, you know, the way you speak, the way you present yourself. Give it all that context and then in the marketing example here, give it some brainstorm ideas, some ideas you've brainstormed, and if you give it some, um, uh, some, some problems you've solved and, and, and the, the approach to, to solving these problems and, and the outcomes and the business benefits, you can feed all that to AI and say, now give me all these derivatives, give me 3 case studies out of this, give me 5 blog posts, give me 2 YouTube scripts if you're doing videos, give me 10 social media posts. So you can ask— yeah, this is more like the generative AI part here. Give it something unique, something from your own experience, something that you've done or something that you have thought of or solutions you've developed, and then have AI generate this for you. And then of course, of course, read it, tweak it, make sure it's your tone, it's your voice. Iterate on it, but you probably saved a whole lot of time. You probably saved hours instead of you just doing this yourself. So, so again, it's not about using AI blindly, it's about using it intelligently. And always, always, always think of your own tone, your own POVs, your own, your own experience, your, your own stories. Those are invaluable, and those will make that content more, bring it to life, bring it to life. It's not just something that, that people generated through a quick prompt, you know, on ChatGPT. So, so think about all your internal processes, everything that you're doing today, and see how is it that you can make it more efficient. I'll give you one last example here before we go to see if we have any, any questions. If you think of— it looks like we have a comment Uh, this is from Ahmed Setki. Thank you so much for your comment. So it says, thanks, Feras, for the amazing work and videos posted on this channel. Very helpful and informative and insightful. Thank you for your note, for your comment. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. So, um, um, yeah, thanks. So, so if you are— if it takes you, let's say, 5 let's say 2 hours beyond the— to generate a proposal, a sales proposal. You can leverage AI to bring this down to minutes, at least to generate it, and then you might need like half an hour to review it. So I have— I published actually a video, a long video, an hour and 4 minute video, my longest video on proposals, the ultimate guide to, to develop winning proposals. And in there, towards the end of that video, I provided 2 AI assistants that you can use right away. One is with ChatGPT and one with, with Google's NotebookLM. And basically you, you do this once, you, you provide— and I, I gave you the instructions how to take what I provided and, and customize it for your own purposes. So you take, you go to, you build a custom GPT and you feed it all the information about your business and sample proposals, proposals that you have won. And if you're new, again, I provided a sample proposal you can leverage and about what makes you stand out, about certifications, company background, all that information. And then the custom GPT I have, it actually prompts you for all these things. So once you provided all that information and it's saved there for you, it has all that context, then next time when you have a proposal to write after you've met the client, you go to that custom GPT and you can then enter the customer-specific information and it will generate that winning proposal for you. Of course, review it. Of course, refine it. Make sure I did not hallucinate. But that whole process, I think it would at least save you a couple hours. And if you're doing a couple proposals a week That is 4 hours a week that you can spend talking to clients, delivering services, getting new leads. So find ways in your own processes, find ways to leverage AI to be more efficient and also more effective. You can use— and one of this last example here before we wrap it up— and there's so many, so many AI solutions out there, and I'm— I don't get cut from mentioning names, but if you develop slides to clients, if you go in Google Slides, you see this little note at the bottom of it, and I think it says beautify this slide, right? Makes it that it creates something for you. There are other applications like gamma.app, I think gamma.app, yeah, it does phenomenal work in creating a presentation based on prompting, so you give it a prompt and then it creates that presentation presentation for you. I'm not saying you blindly just say, give me a presentation, and expect the tool to give you something that will work for you and win you a deal. You still have to give it meaningful information. You can't be a lazy prompter because everyone— you want to stand out. You want to do something that is above and beyond. So make sure you understand the problem that the customer has, you understand their environment, you understand what part of your solution is a good fit for them, feed all of that, let's for example, to gamma.app, and then it will give you a presentation that's probably 95% ready, and it will look beautiful from a presentation and layout perspective, and again, there are many others, I'm just sharing this as an example, and then you can go in and tweak or add or remove certain things, but that will save you again another couple hours. So, so you'll be competing with other consultants who are doing similar things. So, so the goal here is speed is really important in business. So knowledge, as I always say, education is— learning is education plus application. So we learn about AI, we understand AI, but we have to implement that. We have to apply those processes to our own business, apply these processes and the AI assistance and the AI applications that we want to, that we want to implement for our customers, experiment, experiment with them on our own. And then you can go to the client and talk more intelligently and show them that you are a subject matter expert, not only in, in your technical domain, but also in the tools including AI, that will enable you to, to do things for them more efficiently and more effectively, and that you're keeping them up to speed on, on the latest development in their field. Um, we have a client here from, uh, let's see. Hello, sir. Binge Beats. Okay, Insta. All right. So I'm a student at a National Institute of Technology. I want to know I want to know about career in data analytics. Well, that's a very good question. Again, first of all, thank you so much for joining the live stream. I appreciate it. Um, I mean, you're talking about a career in data analytics, so it could be marketing analyst, could be sales analyst, it could be any sort of things. Uh, but I, I can tell you for certain that It used to take us forever to get to consolidate data, to get the data ready, prepare the data so it can go to a data visualization tool like Tableau or one of the other tools, and it used to take us a whole lot more time to derive insights, and then you go and present that to the client. So whether it's At the data collection level, depending on, on your area of, of specialization or what you will be getting into, there's a lot of— when we say data analytics, there are different, there are different areas within data analytics. There's the data collection. For example, if you're into marketing analytics, you'll see, um, you'll see that you have to collect data from websites, from apps, from all these marketing touchpoints, right? So there's an implementation aspect, there's data collection, so that's one thing. Once you have the data, typically data is not clean, so you have to organize it, you have to maybe add metadata around it, categorize it, segment it, all that good stuff, and then potentially you have to integrate it with other datasets like data from the website, how do we match that with data from the CRM? That's one thing. You can also, once you have all that data and you have a better view of the customer, how do I present that data and show ups and downs and changes? And, you know, I invested $100,000 in this marketing campaign, did it yield? You know, how was the return on that investment? Did we get qualified leads? Did we get online sales? Did we get new customers? What type of customers? So all of that. So there's again collecting the data, preparing the data, cleaning the data, then integrating the data, then presenting, then deriving insights. All of those are areas, I think they're so hot. They were hot many years ago, they're still hot. Of course with AI you can be much more efficient I think with a lot of these pieces of that puzzle from sort of from information to insights, from user behavior and user interaction with your brand and deriving insights. And I'm just giving you an example using marketing analytics, but obviously the same concept applies in other areas of the business, whether it's sales ops data, whether it's financial data, whether it is IT data. So I think My recommendation is, since you're a student, and it looks like you're interested in entrepreneurship, see if you can get practical experience, to the extent that you can be an intern, in person or remote, locally where you are or elsewhere, but to the extent that you can get practical experience, that will increase, that's probably one of the number one factor predicting getting a job is if you've interned and have some practical experience. No one is going to expect you to be— to have 10 years of experience when you just finished college, right? Or if you're planning on doing your own consulting business, then obviously practical experience will help you understand what to package and what to sell. So get, to the extent that you can, volunteer. Don't worry about getting paid. I mean, if you can get paid and intern, that's great, But getting that real sort of real work, real life, real business data experience is really important. The other part is the non-technical skills. While you can automate, you can help AI identify gaps in the data, which maybe it used to take, you know, a whole day, now you can do it in a few minutes. The AI is great at that, but in terms of The communication skill, the presentation skill, active listening skills, judgment. So anything that will help you improve these skills, it's going to be very, very valuable for employers because— or even if you have your own business, when you want to pitch to clients, when you want to— when you meet clients and you want to understand their body language. So all these soft— what they call soft skills are going to be more important in this upcoming era of AI adoption. So that's my 2 cents on your question, but again, thank you for being in. I appreciate you staying up late where you are to be here live with us. I'd like to add another comment. So these are some things that I mentioned, many examples that you can do operationally within your consulting company, even if it— if you're a single operator, or even if you're doing this on the side, especially if you're doing this consulting thing as, as a side hustle for now till you, till you go full-time and take that leap, uh, find ways to leverage applied AI, these AI applications, to do things efficiently in your backend system. So that is it for today. Those are the 3 parts that I wanted to cover. This AI shift could be brutal for consultants. If you want to continue to be a generalist, you're not niching down, you're not specializing, if you're not aware of the challenges that companies are having in implementing AI, and if you're not applying AI in your own delivery and in your own back office, you will have— you are more likely than not to be replaced by AI. So, so my goal here is to help you succeed, is to help you, uh, not just survive but thrive and scale and grow. And, and to do that, learning— in addition to everything you spend and in learning and developing your, your technical expertise in your area, in your domain— that learning thing is ongoing. We have to learn, we We have to unlearn what doesn't work these days, and we have to relearn new things. That is the most— the number one competitive advantage, and this I believe it was the father of modern management, he said the number one competitive advantage for organizations is learning and implementing, adopting and applying that learning to their processes. So keep that in mind as you are going through everything you're reading about and hearing about AI. Don't panic. There's— at the societal level, at the government level, at the moral level, there are other discussions to be had around AI. We can have those discussions over coffee later, but from a business perspective, I want you to increase your chances of not just surviving but thriving. And hopefully you found this content today helpful. I do want to share a couple of things before we wrap it up here. Let me just go here. For those of you who are new to the channel, I want you to go to @StartupWithFeras. Okay, I can't type now. I had it ready. I want you to go to @StartupWithFeras. And check out the channel. I— there's a couple of things that I, I launched just recently. One is this video right here on, um, I— on, on the playbook, the AI playbook that every small consulting firm needs. I covered some of those points today and I elaborated more on it today, but there's some, some certain things in that video that I did not cover today, so check that out. Also, uh, a recent video a couple weeks ago on if you're moving from selling to small businesses to enterprise, or if you want to understand the difference in selling or pitching enterprise versus, versus small businesses, this is a great video. And then if you are thinking about going to entrepreneurship and you don't have— you're not sure what idea to pursue, I have this video also 26 Profitable Business Ideas for 2026. So, and last but not least, if you just need a full step-by-step framework on how to start a business and how to start a consulting company successfully, this is the video that you want to watch, The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Consulting Business This Year. I go— it's a long video, 51 minutes. And I go through every step you need with all the worksheets, all the templates, everything you need to get that first client. So check it out and let me know. Again, if you're struggling, if you're having issues with any aspect of the business of entrepreneurship, do not hesitate to reach out. I'm here to help. I'm here to support. And just reach out. And that's it for today. And we will see you next week, every Tuesday at 3 PM Eastern, noon Pacific, or whatever time zone you're in. Join us live, or if you're listening later, if you're, um, watching later, join us and I'll be more than happy to answer your question. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel and hit the like button. I appreciate it. See you next time.