Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 10/ 11

00:00:00: Provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about strategy and consulting from CW-XN-Eleven.

00:00:08: Frenness specializes in B to B market research for Strategy & Consulting teams with a focus on tech and ICT.

00:00:15: Right, so welcome to today's deep dive.

00:00:17: Yeah we are unpacking the top strategy and consulting trends that have been blowing up across LinkedIn over past two weeks.

00:00:24: And if you're sitting in a boardroom right now or maybe a private equity firm Or a consulting partnership I mean The ground beneath your feet is just fundamentally shifting.

00:00:34: Oh, absolutely!

00:00:35: The big realization we're seeing everywhere is that you know the AI models?

00:00:38: they aren't the bottleneck anymore.

00:00:39: no

00:00:40: not at all.

00:00:40: it's the messy brutal reality of corporate politics legacy data and well just basic human resistance.

00:00:47: yeah

00:00:47: That's the real hurdle.

00:00:48: exactly so today We're exploring how AIs completely rewiring Corporate strategy plus the death Of what people are calling lazy consulting

00:00:57: right?

00:00:57: And why?

00:00:58: the biggest hurdles to this whole transformation Aren't technological at All.

00:01:01: They're Human.

00:01:02: Okay, let's unpack this.

00:01:03: We're starting right at the top

00:01:06: of printing a map once a year.

00:01:12: Yeah, highly centralized right?

00:01:14: A small team locks themselves in a room for three months makes the plan and then it just sort of cascades

00:01:19: down.

00:01:19: exactly yeah but looking at recent insights from Nina Cady Eva and Michael Briggle at BCG.

00:01:26: AI is turning that static map into a real-time GPS.

00:01:29: I love that analogy because i mean a gps recalculates automatically when you hit traffic.

00:01:36: Corporate strategy usually doesn't do that.

00:01:38: It just waits until the Q three board meeting, you know?

00:01:41: So how is this actually happening?

00:01:43: well it

00:01:43: comes down to sheer analytical bandwidth.

00:01:45: Michael Brick shared some BCG data and The numbers are just massive.

00:01:49: What are we

00:01:50: looking at?

00:01:50: they found That roughly eighty percent of typical Strategy tasks Are now highly exposed To AI automation.

00:01:56: wait eighty percent.

00:01:57: yeah eighty percent.

00:01:59: We're talking the heavy lifting market research competitive analysis data synthesis.

00:02:04: And when you remove the friction there, your moving strategy from this centralized planning thing to supercharged decentralized information gathering.

00:02:14: Okay but if eighty percent of analytical work is exposed to AI You aren't just speeding things up Your breaking old org chart.

00:02:21: Oh totally!

00:02:22: You don't need a massive team of analysts spending month building market sizing deck If an AI agent can synthesize it in hour

00:02:30: Right.

00:02:31: So, organizations are realizing they need entirely new roles.

00:02:34: Briggle points to the split between social strategists and technical strategies.

00:02:38: Interesting!

00:02:39: What's the difference?

00:02:40: The technical strategist —they're architects—design decision systems in data pipelines But the social strategist is just as critical.

00:02:48: Their job is handling buy-in adoption and navigating all emotional pushback to algorithmic decisions.

00:02:54: I want to push back on that eighty percent number for a second though, if AI can do eighty percent of the analytical work our chief strategy officer is going become obsolete like... Do CSOs just babysit models now?

00:03:06: Well

00:03:06: what's fascinating here?

00:03:07: how the mandate is shifting.

00:03:09: Nick Jamison highlighted this Deloitte survey The twenty-twenty six Chief Strategy Officer Survey.

00:03:15: Right!

00:03:15: I saw it

00:03:16: And It gets right to your point.

00:03:18: Ninety five percent of CSOs expect AI to materially shape their priorities But only sixteen percent are actually using it to fundamentally reimagine their business.

00:03:27: Sixteen percent so most of them or just what?

00:03:30: stuck running little test projects exactly

00:03:32: pilot purgatory.

00:03:33: Yeah, they're playing in a sandbox but They won't bet the core business on it

00:03:38: and gigantrola expanded on this.

00:03:40: AI is no longer just this enabling program sitting next to the business.

00:03:44: It literally is the corporate strategy now, right?

00:03:46: If CSOs just run fragmented pilots they drift into what Jameson calls random acts of AI

00:03:52: Random acts of a man.

00:03:54: you see that everywhere marketing buys a generative tool supply chain runs a pilot and none of it connects

00:03:59: exactly Allie's.

00:04:00: I added that CSOs have to leverage their confidence Right Now To close those capacity gaps.

00:04:05: You Have to lead with AI to keep A competitive Edge.

00:04:09: And if the way companies build strategy is fundamentally changing, then that consultants advising them have to evolve too right?

00:04:16: Absolutely.

00:04:17: The advisory model's getting completely upended

00:04:19: Which brings us this super blunt observation from Shubham S. He just flat out said lazy consulting is dead.

00:04:26: Yeah it really is.

00:04:27: AI isn't killing consulting but its forcing it grow-up Because

00:04:31: clients don't actually struggle with the AI models.

00:04:33: The models are commoditized

00:04:35: Right.

00:04:35: they struggle in context the messy data, legacy systems and org politics.

00:04:40: You can't just hand over a generic fifty-page slide deck anymore!

00:04:44: So whole business model has to shift?

00:04:46: Yeah.

00:04:47: Thomas Granvik analyzed some research from Anthropic in KPMG about this... The traditional consulting leverage pyramid is collapsing… You

00:04:55: mean where you have a few partners at top with an army of junior analysts billing hours on the

00:04:59: bottom?!

00:05:00: Exactly – that model relied on juniors doing heavy.

00:05:04: Teams are restructuring now.

00:05:06: Around the AI?

00:05:07: Right, you have senior experts orchestrating AI agents instead.

00:05:11: Rich Weber echoed this too.

00:05:12: he said professionals won't do the repetitive work.

00:05:15: they'll orchestrate fleets of AI tools doing it.

00:05:18: Wow and The winning firms won't necessarily be the smallest but the ones with the highest ratio Of AI execution per human.

00:05:27: okay here's where it gets really interesting though.

00:05:29: yeah

00:05:30: if the AI

00:05:30: does all that entry-level data crunching and draft writing, how do junior consultants ever learn the ropes?

00:05:38: That is the existential question right now.

00:05:40: Right

00:05:41: because the analyst years are where you build your pattern recognition.

00:05:44: if you automate the bottom don't you break the training ground?

00:05:47: well Casper Blick Simonson ran this really cool experiment to test the solution for that.

00:05:51: he used AI to simulate an entire SAP design workshop.

00:05:55: oh really but he didn't use the AI.

00:05:57: He used it as the client.

00:05:59: Wait, The AI acted.

00:06:01: is a client stakeholder?

00:06:02: Yeah!

00:06:02: It acted as a difficult cross-functional client... ...it pushed back on KPIs, introduced department politics and forced him to defend his logic.

00:06:10: Oh

00:06:10: wow so its basically flight simulation for consultants.

00:06:13: Exactly Its sandboxed for young consultants to practice structuring models before facing real world complexity.

00:06:20: That's

00:06:21: brilliant!

00:06:21: You don't need them formatting Excel sheets for three years to learn.

00:06:25: Right, though Christian Rauch makes a good point here technical configuration isn't enough anymore.

00:06:31: Yeah it is just the baseline.

00:06:32: Exactly consultants have to master business architecture and executive storytelling To actually get a seat at the strategy table.

00:06:39: Speaking of getting a seat At The Table, Luke Smyers shared A crazy real-world case study on the power Of focus right now.

00:06:47: Oh yeah!

00:06:47: The firm that cut their services Yes...a

00:06:49: consulting firm deliberately Cut thirty percent of its services Just chopped them to Focus purely On high complexity problems Which

00:06:57: is terrifying for our partnership.

00:06:59: Totally terrifying.

00:07:00: They took a fourteen percent Revenue hit right out of the gate, but eighteen months later their overall profits were up sixteen percent.

00:07:08: Yeah specificity and focus provide the ultimate risk protection in this era.

00:07:13: But you know we have these grand visions of AI orchestration and focused consulting...but then it collides with actual company culture.

00:07:20: Oh!

00:07:21: The collision.

00:07:23: Tanya W. gave this massive reality check, despite all the hype around autonomous agents, seventy to eighty percent of procurement teams are still running on Excel.

00:07:32: ninety seven two thousand

00:07:34: three It's wild!

00:07:36: So what does that mean?

00:07:38: Are companies just skipping a step?

00:07:40: They kind-of ARE!

00:07:41: Zal Rashidi shared data showing that seventy four to eighty eight percent of AI initiatives stop at proof concept phase.

00:07:48: That

00:07:48: is huge failure rate And

00:07:50: it not tech failure but strategic readiness gap.

00:07:53: It's like trying to put a sports car engine into a horse-drawn carriage.

00:07:56: Exactly!

00:07:57: The power is there, but the structure can't handle it.

00:08:00: Yeah, Cabra points out that building these AI centers of excellence... ...is actually an org navigation challenge.

00:08:06: Right because if funding sits in a central innovation hub But delivery accountability sits out on business units

00:08:12: Then you just get drifted.

00:08:13: The alignment completely breaks down.

00:08:15: Brian Elliott warns that AI simply magnifies your existing

00:08:18: culture."

00:08:19: Oh, that makes sense!

00:08:20: If you're a cultural reward's mere activity over actual outcomes... ...AI just speeds up the treadmill.

00:08:25: You get more noise More drafts More emails No value

00:08:29: Right.

00:08:30: And Jim Rowan emphasized That you have to deliberately design the relationship between humans and machines.

00:08:36: Also You have hard-wired decision rights and psychological safety.

00:08:40: Otherwise, organizations just accumulate toxic cultural debt.

00:08:44: Toxic

00:08:44: cultural debt?

00:08:45: I like that phrase!

00:08:47: But how is this rapid shift impacting the actual humans doing their

00:08:51: work?".

00:08:52: It's intense... David Edelman and Julie Boudard talked about this concept of AI brain fry.

00:08:59: Yeah it's the mental fatigue from overseeing AI beyond your natural cognitive capacity.

00:09:05: Reviewing all that synthetic output just burns people out,

00:09:08: frying their circuit

00:09:09: exactly.

00:09:10: but Robert and Baldy had some interesting conversations with energy CFOs about this.

00:09:14: Eighty percent of them are designing AI into the workforce okay?

00:09:17: But they're true.

00:09:17: focus is actually retaining human skills.

00:09:20: wait really not cutting headcount.

00:09:23: no there using zero-touch automation as a retention strategy want to eliminate the drudgery so we keep our best people engaged.

00:09:29: Okay, that changes the investment thesis entirely.

00:09:31: So how do the investors like private equity firms underwrite this kind of transformation?

00:09:36: Well,

00:09:37: Tophic Hammett touched on that.

00:09:39: PE firms can't just hand out AI licenses and expect higher returns.

00:09:43: right you Can't Just buy a sauce tool And walk away

00:09:45: exactly.

00:09:46: lasting value comes from totally reshaping The operating models but the foundational rules of finance still apply.

00:09:53: Right.

00:09:53: Tim Vipond highlighted This.

00:09:55: You Still Need A Structured Decision Tree for valuation.

00:09:59: Methods like DCF, COMPS and precedent transactions remain critical anchors.

00:10:04: So all these AI insights still have to translate into classic financial frameworks?

00:10:09: They have too.

00:10:09: you can't ignore the math.

00:10:10: What about external risks though?

00:10:12: The macro environment feels incredibly volatile right now Like geopolitical risk.

00:10:17: Yeah And just be clear for your listening We're strictly reporting market observations here.

00:10:21: we are not endorsing any political stances Absolutely!

00:10:24: We are strictly impartial.

00:10:26: But Alyssa Lugo warns that corporate boards have to adapt their governance, to handle this geopolitical volatility and sociopolitical polarization.

00:10:34: What's an example of that in technical diligence?

00:10:37: AJ Green reported on a clash where the Pentagon pressured Anthropic to strip safety guardrails for military use... Wow!

00:10:45: ...and at the same time foreign labs are trying to clone their models.

00:10:48: That is massive risk.

00:10:50: if your target company has built one those models

00:10:53: Exactly.

00:10:54: Evan Benjamin also noted the quit GPT movement where users migrated to Claude over political and ethical concerns.

00:11:00: Right, again we aren't taking a side but for M&A and strategy professionals tool loyalty ethics And geopolitical exposure are now massive variables

00:11:11: because if you acquire a company and their AI vendor suddenly faces a boycott or government restriction Your investment is toast.

00:11:18: Exactly, which brings us to a final provocative thought from David Pizzley regarding decision intelligence.

00:11:23: Okay what's that?

00:11:24: Well if the future of enterprise architecture is heavily automated maybe the ultimate competitive advantage isn't being AI first.

00:11:31: What is it then?

00:11:32: Being decisions centric?

00:11:34: If AI eventually determines everyone's baseline strategy The only true edge left Is human capacity to govern those systems.

00:11:41: Ah!

00:11:42: To ask the questions that AI hasn't even thought of.

00:11:44: Exactly, That's a real differentiator going forward.

00:11:46: I love it.

00:11:47: The human is the ultimate edge.

00:11:50: Yeah

00:11:51: If you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:11:54: Also check out our other editions on Private Equity Venture Capital and M&A.

00:11:58: Thanks so much for joining us!

00:12:00: Thank You And don't forget to subscribe.

00:12:02: Catch you in the next deep dive.