Brazil5 ways consultants can work smarter with Generative AI
You are a consultant and you want to work with Generative AI. All around you, you hear that Generative AI can help you gain new insights, work faster, and outsource tedious work. But where and how do you start? Like most things, you need to begin with the basics – new research from LexisNexis outlines the five most common use cases.
1) Automated market research
For a new assignment, consultants are expected to be well informed about the industry, competitors and trends. However, conducting this type of market research usually involves hours of sifting through reports, data and news, leaving professionals with little time to analyse the research to serve your client most effectively.
Generative AI (Gen AI) could change that. By formulating specific prompts, consultants can generate customised research reports in minutes.
For example: “Summarise the current state of the health technology market using data from CB Insights and recent news. Include market size, growth forecasts, and key competitors in about 250 words.”
This type of prompt gives you a quick, focused start – allowing you to spend more time analysing insights, rather than collecting them.
2) Quickly generating materials for customers
Once you've gathered your research and developed strategic recommendations, the next step is to translate your insights into customer-centric content. Clients require presentations, reports, and executive summaries that are sharp, tailored, and easy to understand.
While creating this content can be time-consuming, Gen AI again offers a new way forward. By using specific prompts, consultants can quickly generate customised research reports.
For example, if a consultant was preparing a growth strategy presentation for a retail client, they might ask, “Create a slide with a graph showing a retail client's revenue growth.” Or, “Create a 200-word executive summary highlighting key challenges and opportunities.”
Gen AI can quickly generate draft simple, bullet-pointed content. This will serve as a quick and easy base, which you can then refine and customise for your specific assignment.
3) Analysing transcripts, reports and financial documents
Reviewing and extracting insights from long-form documents, like transcripts, or annual reports, is an essential but time-consuming part of consulting work. Manually sifting through hundreds of pages to identify key points can take hours, especially for professionals who have to juggle multiple client projects. That’s where Gen AI comes in.
According to LexisNexis’ ‘How Management Consultants Are Leading the Gen AI Revolution’ study, consultants using Gen AI can find time-savings here of between three and four hours a day.
Instead of starting from scratch, users can ask an AI tool to do the initial review for them. For example: “Summarise the last three years of 10-K filings for Company X. Include key financial metrics like revenue, margins, and cash flow.”
Within minutes, the AI delivers a summary, highlighting the critical numbers and priorities to inform business decisions. This allows consultants to skip the repetitive review process and dive straight into the strategic thinking their customers are paying for.
4) Monitoring news and market developments
Keeping customers informed about market trends is essential. But tracking multiple sources every day can eat into a consultant’s time for developing strategies.
To streamline this process, Gen AI can scan thousands of news items and generate summaries tailored to the client's industries.
Within seconds, Gen AI can deliver a news brief, highlighting important developments. While a consultant should still double-check the points they really want to dig into, this overview of things like mergers and acquisitions, sales forecasts, and leadership changes, could save hours of manual reading.
5) Processing and analysing customer data
When working with clients, consultants often get large data sets such as sales figures, customer data, operational statistics and more. Manually reviewing and interpreting this information can be a slow and time-consuming process. But with the right prompt, Gen AI can help by quickly scanning and analysing these datasets to quickly surface important trends and insights.
For example: “Analyse this customer purchase data and identify differences in buying behavior between new and returning customers. Highlight peak sales periods and best performing products by region.”
By highlighting this kind of information efficiently, a consultant can focus on developing strategic recommendations aligned with client goals based on the data trends, rather than trying to decipher those trends themselves.
