AI isn’t killing consulting. It’s killing time as a proxy for value

“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?” I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one. Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took. If the work now takes minutes instead of hours, why should customers still pay the same? The answer is that they were never buying your time in the first place. Rewind a decade or so in IT consulting About ten years ago, I was regularly delivering a consulting engagement for risual. We called it a Vision and Scoping Document and it typically took around ten days to complete. My sales colleagues would often describe it to customers as a “ten-day engagement”. Every time I heard that, it grated. The customer wasn’t buying ten days. They were buying clarity — a clear understanding of where they were, where they wanted to be and a roadmap for getting there. The ten…