Emmanuel Arome DBA, MBA

If you work at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, PwC, if you are an in-house consultant or an independent, you are witnessing the consulting industry being split in two. I just mapped 60 core consulting skills (both hard and soft) against the impending threat of Generative AI. The result is what I called the Consulting AI Threat Matrix, and it reveals which skills will be commoditized and which will become your ultimate competitive moat. I plotted these skills across two dimensions (because I'm a consultant and I love a good quadrant 😅) The dimensions are: 1) Modality of execution (Algorithmic vs. Interpersonal) 2) Environmental entropy (Deterministic vs. Ambiguous) The findings are a wake-up call for how firms train their talent: - The Commoditization Zone (Bottom-Left): Standard financial modeling, UI/UX, RPA, and slide generation are facing severe disruption. If your value is tied to synthesizing clean data in predictable environments, GenAI will do it faster. - The Augmentation Zone (Bottom-Right): Cloud architecture, predictive modeling, and hypothesis-driven problem-solving. GenAI is your co-pilot here, but human knowledge and judgment is required to navigate the ambiguity. - The Strategic Premium (Top-Right): Consensus building, crisis de-escalation, unbiased judgment, and executive storytelling. GenAI cannot read a hostile stakeholder or mediate a turf war between a CIO and a CMO. This is the human moat. If you are a senior consultant, a manager, director, partner, or aspiring consultant, your career trajectory depends on migrating to the top right. I put together a detailed 10-page paper breaking down exactly how these 60 skills were evaluated, the criteria for each quadrant, and how consulting firms need to restructure their training programs to survive this shift, plus what actions you can take to safeguard yourself. Just ping me somehow (comment here or DM me) and I'll send you the paper. All the best!