Consulting has an odd relationship with AI. The work is mostly words, research and structure - exactly what the tools are good at - yet the thing clients pay for is judgement, which the tools do not have. The way through is to be precise about which half of the job you are automating.
The work that suits it
Most engagements contain a layer of assembly: gathering, structuring and drafting that has to happen before the thinking can. That layer is where agentic workflows earn their keep:
- Discovery synthesis. Ten interviews produce ten sets of notes in ten shapes. A workflow that pulls them into one structure, groups what was said by theme, and flags where people disagreed turns a day of collation into a review.
- Proposal assembly. Most proposals are built from previous proposals. A pipeline that drafts from your own past work, in your own structure, against the client’s actual brief, gets you to the version worth editing much faster.
- Findings from meetings. Notes and transcripts into structured findings, each tagged with where it came from - so the trail from evidence to recommendation is visible when a client asks.
- Checking the deliverable against the brief. A reviewer step that reads the draft and the brief side by side and lists what was promised but not answered. Dull, mechanical, and exactly the thing that gets missed at 11pm before a deadline.
The work that does not
The recommendation itself. The prioritisation. Anything where the client is paying for your view rather than your assembly. Hand those over and you are not more efficient - you are selling a worse product with your name on it.
Confidentiality draws its own line. Client material goes only into tools your engagement terms and their policies actually allow. That is not a footnote for a consultant; it is the condition for using any of this at all. Check first, build second.
Why this compounds for consultants in particular
A consultancy sells time, which means every efficiency either becomes margin or capacity. An associate you hire helps on the engagements they staff. A workflow you build is different in kind: the discovery-synthesis pipeline from this engagement is still there for the next one, and the one after that. Firms that treat workflows as reusable assets - named, kept, improved between engagements - are building something the timesheet never shows.
Where this gets practical
The hard part is not agreeing with any of this. It is building the first workflow against a real engagement rather than a demo. That is what a day at the Oxford Agentic Bootcamp is for: bring one real task - a synthesis, a proposal, a review step - build a working pipeline against it in a room where someone walks over when you get stuck, and leave with it running. No coding required.