Consulting

Consulting is the English word for advising. It refers to experts who are brought into a company from outside to help with a problem. They are not employed there, but work for a consulting firm and are paid for a specific assignment. Typical questions: Why is our profit declining? Should we build a factory in Poland? How do we introduce new software? At the end there is usually a report with a recommendation, often supplemented by help with implementation. The company itself must make the decision.

Why companies pay outsiders to solve their own problems

At first glance, consulting seems odd. No one knows a company better than its own employees. But the decisive advantage of consultants is comparison. They have already seen the same problem at ten other companies. A single company simply cannot gather that kind of experience on its own.

A second reason is capacity. A large project suddenly requires twenty people, and afterward none at all. Consultants can be booked for six months and then let go. Permanent staff would have to be paid indefinitely.

There are also less pleasant reasons. Some executives use a consulting report to back up unpopular decisions. When jobs are cut, “the analysis showed it” sounds better than “I want it this way.” Critics call this outsourcing responsibility. Consulting is therefore a business that earns a lot of money and attracts a lot of distrust.

From engagement to slide deck

A consulting project usually follows similar steps. First, the assignment is defined: which question is to be answered, in what timeframe, for what fee. Then the team gathers data. It reviews internal figures, conducts interviews with employees, and compares the company with competitors.

Next comes the analysis. Big problems are broken down into small sub-questions until each one can be answered individually. From the answers, a recommendation is built. It is presented almost always as a slide presentation, known in jargon as a deck. This is so typical that consultants are sometimes mockingly called slide builders.

Payment varies. Often by the day: a consultant can easily cost several thousand euros per day, so a team quickly reaches six-figure sums per month. Sometimes there is a fixed price for a result. Less often, the fee depends on actual success, such as costs saved. It is important to distinguish this from temporary staffing: consultants are supposed to deliver knowledge, not simply labor.

Consulting in the AI wave

The same names keep appearing in the news. McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain are considered strategy consultants for the big questions. Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and others are additionally strong in technology and auditing. Together they employ hundreds of thousands of people and advise corporations, hospitals, and government ministries.

Business is booming especially around the topic of artificial intelligence. Many companies know they should be doing something with AI, but not what. Consultants then help find sensible use cases, organize data, and train employees. Accenture regularly reports contracts in the billions for this. Such figures are a good indicator of how seriously companies are taking the topic.

At the same time, AI threatens the consulting industry’s own business model. A large part of classic consulting work is research, analysis, and slide design. Language models can now partly take over exactly that. That is why consulting firms themselves are intensively testing AI tools and hiring fewer entry-level employees. Anyone wanting to enter the industry today should expect the work to change significantly.