AI for strategy consultants: competitive analysis, synthesis and presentations in less time

If you’re a strategy consultant or management advisor, your real day isn’t glamorous: it’s hours reading industry reports, reconciling data from several sources, building the one slide that captures it all in a single idea, and fighting with the deck at 11 p.m. before the client meeting. The good news is that artificial intelligence can already carry a big chunk of that weight for you.

Not to think for you. To take away the mechanical part and leave you what you actually get paid for: the judgment and the recommendation.

Where AI fits into your work

Strategy lives on one thing: turning a lot of messy information into a few clear decisions. That “turning” involves a lot of grunt work a modern AI does well:

• Competitive analysis: summarize the players in a market, their moves and their differences into a comparable table.
• Synthesizing complex information: take three long reports, an interview transcript and your notes, and hand back the patterns and the tensions.
• Structuring recommendations: organize your loose ideas into a clear framework (problem, options, criteria, recommendation).
• Executive presentations: turn your analysis into a deck script, with the message of each slide and the order that tells the story.

What used to take you two days of “digesting material” can now take an afternoon.

A real example: from the mountain of data to the slide

Imagine you have to recommend whether a client should enter a new market. You have reports, interview notes and a spreadsheet of numbers. The flow is this:

1. You give it the material. Paste or upload your sources to an AI like Claude or ChatGPT (always check what information you’re allowed to share).
2. You ask for synthesis, not a summary. For example: “From all this, give me the 3 forces moving this market, the 2 most serious entry barriers, and where the sources contradict each other”.
3. You structure the recommendation. “Organize this as: situation, complication, key question, three options with pros and cons, and a recommendation with its reasoning”.
4. You build the deck script. “Turn it into 8 slides, give me the title and the single message of each one”.

You review, challenge every conclusion, and layer your experience on top. The heavy lifting is already done.

The trick: ask it to think in frameworks

The difference between a mediocre answer and a useful one almost always lives in how you ask. A consultant has an edge: you already think in frameworks. Use them in your prompts.

Instead of “analyze this company”, ask “analyze this company with a five-forces framework and point out where the data is weak”. Instead of “summarize this industry”, ask “give me the map of players by size and business model, and the three trends that would change the board in 24 months”. When you give the AI the skeleton of how to think, the quality jumps.

The part that stays yours

AI is incredibly fast at reading and organizing, but it doesn’t know your client, or the internal politics of their company, or what was said in that meeting. And it can make up a fact with full confidence if you don’t watch it. So:

• Always verify every number and every quote before putting them on a slide; AI sometimes invents sources.
• Don’t upload confidential client information without confirming the tool’s privacy policies and what your firm allows.
• Use it for drafts, synthesis and structure, not as the final source of truth. You sign the recommendation.

A consultant’s value was never reading fast. It was the judgment, the read on the situation, and the courage to recommend. The machine doesn’t do that.

Start small

Don’t overhaul your whole method tomorrow. Pick one thing this week: the competitive analysis for your next project, or the synthesis of that report you’ve been putting off. Hand it to an AI, challenge what it gives back, and see how many hours it saves you.

If I, without being a McKinsey consultant, can structure complex ideas with AI, you with your strategy experience can multiply what you already do well. You just have to start.