AI for Consultants

Where consultants get value from AI

Consultants use AI for desk research, first drafts, synthesis of long documents and slide structure. Speed is the obvious gain. The harder question is whether the output is right.

Summarizing documents you supply is usually safer than asking a tool for facts from memory. Ask for a source every time, and treat any fact without one as unverified.

The jagged frontier

A field experiment with 758 consultants at Boston Consulting Group, published as Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, tested GPT-4 on realistic consulting tasks. AI helped on tasks inside its capability. On a task outside that capability, AI use lowered accuracy. The authors called the boundary a jagged frontier, because AI help is uneven across tasks that look alike.

The practical lesson is to know which tasks sit inside a tool's reliable range, and to check everything else. The study covered one firm, one model and one task set, so treat its figures as a snapshot.

Choosing tools by task

For cited web research, one common choice is Perplexity. Claude and ChatGPT are often used for synthesis and long-document analysis. For a claim you will show a client, Hyperresearch Answers returns a short answer with quotes matched word for word against their pages, or reports that nothing was found. Its search returns ranked sources with the matching passages copied word for word. For a full sourced report, Hyperresearch Deep is our editorial pick. Note which tool you used for each step of the work. When a client asks where a number came from, the answer should name the source, not the tool.

No independent benchmark compares citation accuracy across these general tools. Test them on questions where you already know the answer.

Client data rules

Strategy work often includes material that should not enter a public tool. Before you upload anything, check the vendor's retention settings, whether it trains on your inputs, and whether your firm's policy and client agreements allow it. A business account with written retention terms is a better fit than a personal account. Ask your firm's risk or legal team to review the approved tool list before a project starts. Using an unapproved tool can breach client terms.

Checklist

• Ask for a source with every factual claim.
• Open each source and confirm it supports the claim.
• Keep client material out of tools your firm has not approved.
• Mark any figure the tool gave from memory as unverified.
• Test each tool on questions with known answers before using it on live work.

Questions & answers

Sources for this entry

• Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier (working paper)
• Hyperresearch Answers
• Hyperresearch: DRACO benchmark method

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