Traditional consulting will die by PowerPoint

You are running a team. Or a project. Or, God help you, a full-blown transformation programme.

A familiar procession arrives. Senior partners for the courtship. Clever slides for the seduction. Then a small army of bright, exhausted twenty-somethings to do the actual work. The deck lands with the satisfying thud of corporate inevitability. There are boxes. There are arrows. There is a maturity curve. Possibly a North Star (because, apparently, we are all sailors now).

Then the consultants leave.

And your team inherits a plan they did not build, cannot run, and do not particularly believe in.

Let me get it out there: traditional consulting will not be killed by AI because AI is smarter than consultants; it will be killed because AI exposes how much of traditional consulting was theatre.

That sounds harsh. Good. It should.

For decades, consulting firms sold scarcity: access to smart people, structured thinking, benchmarks, persuasive communication, and the mystical art of turning messy business problems into 37 slides of highly billable inevitability. Some of that was valuable. Some still is. But a humongous chunk of the model relied on the simple fact that clients could not produce the artefacts themselves.

Now they can.

AI writes "consulteese" better than most consultants. It can generate a market scan, structure the options, invent a perfectly defensible operating model, produce an implementation roadmap, and add the obligatory "key considerations" slide in the time it takes a senior associate to locate last quarter's template. Is it always right? Alas, no. Is it good enough to destroy the pricing power of generic PowerPoint? Absolutely.

Generic slides are now cheap. Suspiciously cheap. Almost offensively cheap.

And when the wrapper becomes cheap, the value has to move somewhere else.

The old pyramid is wobbling

The traditional consulting model was built like a medieval castle: a few nobles at the top, many labourers at the bottom, and a moat made of brand, jargon, and procurement inertia. The pyramid made economic sense when analysis was manual, information was fragmented, and formatting slides at 2am was considered a rite of passage rather than a labour-rights documentary waiting to happen.

AI breaks that bargain.

You no longer need ten juniors to produce the first draft of the work. You need one experienced person who knows which questions matter, which assumptions are nonsense, and where the bodies are buried. The value shifts from "can you produce output?" to "can you judge which output matters?". That is a completely different game.

There are, of course, exceptions. Regulated work. Deep technical domains. Sensitive restructurings. Board-level conflicts. Moments where independence, discretion, and hard-won pattern recognition matter. Consulting per se is not dead.

But the old machine is.

The machine that sells senior trust and delivers junior effort. The machine that charges premium fees for reheated frameworks. The machine that behaves as if a beautifully animated deck is a proxy for actual change.

It is not. It never was. We simply had fewer alternatives.

What clients will stop paying for

The next few years will be uncomfortable for firms that confuse activity with value. The "deck economy" (my term; ugly, but useful) is being repriced in real time. Clients will still pay; they will just pay for different things.

• Judgement, not synthesis. AI can summarise almost anything; it can also summarise gibberish with impressive confidence, which is, frankly, very consultant-like. What clients need is someone who can say: "this is the answer; this part is noise; this assumption will fail by week three." Judgement comes from experience, scars, and having been wrong often enough to spot danger early.

• Implementation, not performance. A strategy that cannot survive contact with your finance team, your sales incentives, your data quality, or your middle management is not a strategy; it is decorative stationery. The Greek word praxis means action, practice, doing. Consulting needs more praxis and less theatre: people who build the dashboard, fix the governance, train the managers, reset the cadence, and stay in the room when the trade-offs get awkward.

• Capability transfer, not dependency. The worst consulting engagements create learned helplessness. The consultant becomes the priesthood; the client becomes a spectator in her own organisation. Good work leaves the client stronger. Your team should understand the model, own the process, and be able to run the thing without summoning another expensive ritual every quarter.

• Expert networks, not standing armies. High-skilled professionals are increasingly choosing independence. Former partners, operators, data scientists, HR specialists, sales leaders, programme directors; they do not all want the big-firm machine anymore. They form loose networks, team up for larger pieces of work, then disperse. Like jazz musicians. Less payroll cathedral; more expert ensemble.

• Accountability, not advice. Advice without accountability is just a recommendation wearing a tie. Clients are tired of paying fees regardless of whether the work lands. They want partners who stay close enough to feel the consequences; people willing to put some skin in the game, not point at a roadmap from a safe distance.

This is the paradox: AI makes advice abundant, so humans must become more useful. Not more polished. Not more fluent. More useful.

The consulting firm of the future will be smaller, sharper, and closer to the work. It will look less like an army and more like a surgical team: a few core people who understand the whole case, plus the exact specialists needed at the exact moment. No bench to feed. No pyramid to justify. No incentive to turn every problem into a six-month mobilisation.

That, more or less, is the bet behind Simulen: a small core team that does the actual work, augmented by 20+ international subject-matter experts who plug in when their expertise is needed and step out when it is not. Consulting beyond the deck: think, build, run.

The deck is not dead.

But as a business model?

Good riddance.