Will management consulting jobs be destroyed by generative AI?

Deloitte got into a bit of hot water recently. A report they produced, under a $439,000 contract, for part of the Australian government showed many of the hallmarks of being produced via generative AI.

The level of carelessness to have references so far off from actual sources is astounding for the price that Deloitte was charging. Even if a new graduate was overworked and pressed for time in filling in the reference list, wouldn't Deloitte have a quality control process to catch the mistakes? Why pay for a big-name consulting firm if the quality is no better than a competitor that could provide that quality level for half the price?

And this example demonstrates how chatbots often fail miserably when there's an easily verified right answer. My response was, "Huh?" when I saw accounting and auditing on a list of jobs likely to be replaced by AI. At some point in accounting, customer service order taking, computer programming, and data entry, and writing references in a report, there's a correct answer. Often there's also an easy way of verifying if the response is correct, in the right ballpark, or wrong.

Chatbots usually will land in the right ballpark but exactly correct is elusive for them. The situations where generative AI shines are where an approximately correct answer, rather than an exact answer, is good enough.

Many areas of management consulting are ripe for generative AI. If the consultant simply describes a business problem and gives standard recommendations for that type of problems, generative AI can do that. Even if not every recommendation quite fits the particular business, that approximate answer is usually good enough.

A report with AI-generated text and real references added by a person could probably satisfy a lot of clients undetected.

By Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer to my opening question, of course, is, "No, management consulting jobs will not be destroyed by generative AI."

Optimistically, there are management consultants who deeply understand particular industries and who take the time to understand the companies they work with to spot where a company is falling short and give advice that's deeply customized . Those consultants neither slap together boilerplate recommendations with local examples nor regurgitate the predetermined results the client asks for.

Pessimistically, the mystique of hiring an outside expert to bless a decision may still be worth the money to the executive suite, even if a chatbot could have delivered the exact same report.

On the other hand, as long as the mystique of AI hype lasts, there's a niche for the lazy management consultant to build and market "AI-enhanced" reports, and to turn vice into perceived virtue.