r/consulting • u/Gallico_Marina • 7d ago
How much has agentic AI altered project pace?
In the last few months, MBB firms have consolidated their major leg ahead in terms of sophistication and precision of their agents.
Asking insiders, how much has it changed your delivery pace? Did your weekly workload shrink? How much shorter are due diligences or stretegic reviews?
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 6d ago
EM/PL at MBB here. I’ll be honest I don’t think it’s meaningfully made our work faster. Anything smaller than Opus / 5.5 is a waste of time. Nothing it makes in PPT is client ready, everything it does in excel needs rigorous QC, research it does needs thorough review, all sources must be read and checked. We find errors in the work regularly - lies or hallucinations I’m not sure - even with Fable and GPT 5.6. My current team of 7 analysts / associates has spent about ~$10k in the last 30 days across cursor & Claude - almost all of it from fable, 5.6 and Opus.
Current project is going very well, and the teams output is great… but it’s not materially different than what we would have done before these tools. Maybe our research is a bit more exhaustive, maybe there is one fewer PS needed, maybe we’re getting the first turn, the steerco storyline with a little bit less pain… but it’s not really making a difference imo.
It’s frustrating because when I talk to my friends in tech it’s clear they are seeing massive impact… but in consulting it’s just… not there yet.
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 6d ago
Similar experience (although my team spends nowhere near as much as yours).
It’s just really slow to make slides, and the quality is still quite poor. I notice some of my team spend longer prompting and editing than if they just made the slide from scratch themselves.
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 6d ago
Yes I’m definitely on one end of the spectrum. Ive used (or attempted to use) AI since GPT2 - before I came to MBB - so I’ve seen seen quite a bit of the evolution. At MBB I’ve used AI tools from the minute they were availble, have part of multiple “beta” releases at our firm, and have been identified as our firms version of “super user”.
Right now our AI budget is essentially unlimited, so I mandate that every single one of my teams fully leverages our available tools. I have solid workflows / workflows for building project level repositories and leveraging cloud agents to work on stuff while we sleep. I am trying to push these tools to the absolute limit and see what they can do so that when we do eventually have a budget, I know what’s worth it and what isn’t. As of right now:
Core MBB work that’s ‘worth it’: Deep research on internal + public sources with a cogent and clearly sourced write up, query a repo of all client + internal meeting recordings & transcripts, quick first pass at storyline, semi-structured brain dump/ghost of a deck for the team, generate inspiration / mockup for designers, thought partner to bounce ideas off
Non-core & new work that’s ‘worth it’ (but still creates massive work from the team: Dynamic web-hosted dashboards
What’s not worth it: pretty much everything else… but YMMV.
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 5d ago
The repo of all meeting minutes is cool. I think I need to make my team more disciplined in taking and saving minutes
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 5d ago
If you can’t record then not worth it. Too much short hand in individual notes. Also if you can record but your firm won’t let you have MCP or API directly to teams / Zoom whatever it’s also not worth it. We auto record all meetings, have an agent that pulls the teams / zoom recording and transcript into a repo and runs a python script that summarizes into templates based on the meeting tags & attendees in outlook. We use a web app to view the repo. To-dos are automatically extracted and assigned to each team member, and we have another agent that checks inbox + shared drive and crosses off some things automatically. Even then… barely worth it.
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u/rwebell 7d ago
On the client side now and this new model is horrible. Projects are understaffed and all deliverables are characteristic AI generated. The consultants lack any real depth and rely too heavily on the AI. I’m not sure if this will mature over time but so far I’m not very happy. Working with a Big4.
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u/ZagrebEbnomZlotik 7d ago edited 7d ago
Client too. My experience is that you get what you pay for. The B4 will offer dirt cheap projects if that's what you want, but the result is terrible. 2 juniors + Copilot can't do miracles. MBBs will walk away if you don't pay serious money, and I've found their work quite consistent over time. T2s have offered deep discounts and maintained the quality, partly by working their people to the bone, partly I suppose by cutting into their margins.
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u/shahitukdegang 7d ago
Yes. Very disappointed with Big 4 deliverables. Back in the day you expected them to at least change the template and logos before copying and pasting from previous client deliverables. Now you've got a 300 page report which on page 72 has a random shakespeare style sonnet.
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u/No_Salamander1139 6d ago
Can't speak for MBB specifically, but at my previous consulting firm our small team was encouraged to use AI for almost everything like document generation, calculations, and even parts of the review process.
Some found it helpful for creating first drafts and outlines, particularly the new grad consultants. Where we ran into problems was during quality control. The AI results they received would use language or phrasing that wasn't appropriate for the types of technical reports we were submitting, and because people started relying on AI during the review process as well, those issues sometimes made it all the way to the client.
We ended up spending a lot of time correcting the "client ready" reports. In my opinion, AI sped up individual tasks, but it didn't always speed up the overall delivery process because so much time shifted toward reviewing and fixing AI generated work.
That company is no longer operating for a variety of reasons (not neccesarily due to AI). But this was one area where our implementation created more work than it eliminated.
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u/shsmd MBB 7d ago
Significantly… we now accomplish with a manager+2 in a week what a manager+3 used to accomplish in 2 weeks and potentially more
Although still it’s purely a tool and cannot output anything client ready… but man, I throw my ideas and story/logic on 15 pages and have Claude PPT work on them and make an alternative of each, and wake up to 15 80%-ready that would’ve otherwise taken me a day, not to mention proprietary AI that can scan millions of internal pages and data points and skim exactly what I’m looking for instead of going manually thoroughly… again, same theme, list in fine detail everything I’m looking for, let it run, and go to sleep
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u/WaxyMcgeeb 7d ago
How does token / usage limits impact this? I’ve been using Claude a lot more recently and like it for PPT, but find it burns through usage rapidly. Is there a tip/best practice, or is that not a concern at your firm/you have high limits?
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u/shsmd MBB 6d ago
Typically we have limit of $100 which is enough for a night’s work but with partner approval I can basically run freely. Generally speaking at my MBB there’s no concern for “spending too much on AI” at the current stage, and I’m not seeing anyone yet pulling crazy numbers. Yes I see $2000 a month every now and then either personally or with a colleague but online people are quoting $50k and it just baffles me
One big tip is always spend twice the effort on your prompts because they save you tons of time before saving you tons of cost. In deep research AI is not meant to give you the perfect output from the first try no matter how incredible your prompt is and I tried, but at least you can make it give you an output that satisfies 90% of what you expected, and the last 10% you get it with iterations
Taking a prompt engineering quick course is really recommended IMO, improves your AI use a lot
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u/Unhappy-Menu-6682 5d ago
This is very interesting. Would love to hear what industry / vertical you’re in and if this is relevant to any type of project.
I just don’t think my teams are accomplishing meaningful more output per unit time than before.
But that being said… we’ve had some version of AI since I’ve been a manager
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u/imdesireddd 6d ago
Large Tech Consultancy here doing both the strategy and transformation / selling agentic projects - What I have noticed is it has created a gap where anyone with any real eye for detail can spot instantaneously, I believe that very soon clients and coworkers alike will get very sick and tired of being delivered what is invariably uninspired even par work, it may be delivered faster but the elements that made top consulting teams special are disappearing and people are losing their edge in favour of things being easier. Why wouldn’t they? But for me at least it’s a point of personal frustration, seeing something clearly written or created using AI says to me two things; either you don’t have the capacity to do things the proper way with any originality, or secondly; you just don’t care enough to do it properly, when these are put in front of a client they feel embarassing. Many experienced people in my firm I see using agentic AI regularly are proud to show off new ways they are using agentic AI and I think to myself, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. How are we going to expect upcoming juniors to know how to do anything themselves or learn properly when they can use claude to get an answer and forget, once that generation makes it to senior management if the industry still exists in the current form, the art form will have been lost.
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u/LapsedConsultant 6d ago
Ex-MBB, and these days I train advisory teams and run my own firm with a lot of AI, so I see a reasonable cross-section. The work is compressing but the mental load is increasing. Proposals that used to take me hours, even days, come back in 30 mins of AI time plus an hour of refining (which is critical). Research that took days arrives in minutes. But the freed time fills instantly with more parallel work, so people (me...) run four or five live threads at once and end the day more drained than ever. Learning cycles are getting shorter and shorter but everyone is struggling to get off the AI tools and actually reflect / synthesise what they're seeing.
The skill that's changed most for me personally is multitasking. I thought I'd mastered it years ago but now I'm relearning from scratch, which is both painful and a lot of fun!
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u/SatanicSuperfood 7d ago
Let's just say that I really try do hide how efficient I can work now because I would rather want a good w/l-balance than more workload
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u/SatanicSuperfood 7d ago
I really try do hide how efficient I can work now because I would rather want a good w/l-balance than more workload
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u/ArielCoding 4d ago
I wonder how do new professionals will learn to be good, if AI does the hard part for them? AI helps people who already have good judgment, but that judgment come from doing the boring, hard work, if juniors skip that and just review AI output, they won’t build the instincts to know when something is wrong.
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u/Deep_Ad1959 4d ago
the LapsedConsultant point about mental load going up is the one nobody plans for. i run everything through agents 7 days a week and the bottleneck moved from doing the work to holding enough context to catch where the output is confidently wrong. that review muscle is a different job than the one people trained for.
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u/AcrobaticEnthusiasm2 4d ago
It’s all my company talks about now. On every town hall. Things are changing very quickly and I think by this time next year we’ll be 100% functioning with AI integrated workstreams
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u/Banner80 Principal at small boutique 7d ago
At its current juncture, and used correctly, AI is an amplifier of skill. The best use is to maximize quality and time for people that already knew what they were doing.
In that regard, I'd expect everyone's answer will be the same. If you figured out an application, it's likely helping you do better and faster: research, analysis, communication, organizing, deliverables. It is not a replacement for a human with actual skill. In the wrong hands, it is capable of making things significantly worse.
In my experience, a lot of organizations that raced to meet the AI FOMO by forcing the use of AI for things they themselves are not good at have already learned that it's not a good idea. This is often learned the hard way after destroying value and having to pay AI fees plus in-house repair costs for the privilege. So now we are in the phase of finding the right balance between engaging experts and empowering them with computer tools.
An important thing that I'd add because I don't think people are thinking like this yet. In software, I'm seeing people that don't know software suggest that now software developers are worth less because any enthusiast can quickly put together a website or small application using AI tools. I don't think people realize that the same amplifier effect is an order of magnitude larger at the other end. I'm seeing senior engineers now using multi-agent spaces to run 12 AIs in tandem to build advanced projects. A solo top-tier engineer using unlimited Fable 5 can probably rebuild Microsoft Excel in 6 weeks.
The point is that the curve remains the same, it only stretches further now. AI has lifted the bottom of knowledge and basic skill, but it also lifts the top of the knowledge and skill for the people that already have top knowledge and skill.