AI Makes It Easy for Consulting Firms to Look Like Experts. Firms that Prove Their Expertise Will Benefit.

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at Consulting Magazine’s "Best Firms to Work For" program in Chicago about growing a consulting firm in the age of AI.

Much of the discussion around AI and professional services has focused on what the technology can do: conduct research, analyze information, produce content, accelerate routine work, and make firms more efficient. But there’s another consequence that deserves more attention.

AI is making it remarkably easy for almost any consulting firm to look like an expert.

A firm with limited experience in a particular area can now produce a polished article, white paper or point of view on virtually any subject. The result may be perfectly competent. It may even sound remarkably similar to material produced by a firm that has spent 20 years actually solving the problem.

That creates some bad news and some very good news for established consulting firms.

The Bad News: Consulting Firms Must Prove Their Expertise

For years, consulting firms could establish a degree of credibility simply by publishing intelligent content, maintaining a professional website, and describing the experience of their people. Those things still matter. But they are becoming less effective as evidence of genuine expertise because AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to producing them.

At the same time, AI is changing the way prospective clients discover firms. Instead of working their way through pages of Google results and visiting multiple websites, buyers can increasingly ask an AI platform to identify firms capable of addressing a particular problem and receive a summarized set of alternatives.

That changes the competitive equation. Consulting firms must prove their expertise.

A consulting firm not only needs to possess expertise. It needs to make that expertise sufficiently clear, distinctive, and visible that both people and machines can recognize it.

The Good News: The Visibility Bar Is Getting Higher

For firms with substantial experience, I think that's an opportunity. If generic expertise becomes easier to manufacture, demonstrable expertise becomes more valuable.

The firms that benefit will be those that can move beyond saying we know this and provide evidence that shows here is what we know, here is how we think about the problem, and here is what we have developed from years of solving it.

Ironically, many established consulting firms already possess the intellectual capital they need to demonstrate their expertise. They simply haven't recognized it as an asset.

Valuable Intellectual Capital Is Often Hiding in Plain Sight

Over years of client engagements, consulting firms accumulate methodologies, diagnostic approaches, proprietary data, decision tools, recurring patterns, specialized processes, and insights that less experienced competitors simply don't possess.

Yet much of that intellectual capital remains buried inside the firm.

Sometimes that's because the people using it have been doing so for years and no longer recognize how distinctive it may be. What seems routine to an experienced partner may be extremely valuable to a prospective client.

There's another reason. Consulting firms are businesses in which senior people spend enormous amounts of time serving clients. They're understandably focused on working in the business, leaving little time to step outside it and work on the business. As a result, some of the firm's most valuable intellectual assets are never fully identified, developed, or put to work in the marketplace.

Before AI, many firms could afford to get away with that. The cost of doing that has become much higher.

Don't Just Publish It. Commercialize It.

The answer isn't simply to turn everything the firm knows into more content. We certainly don't need more generic thought leadership. The real opportunity is to identify the expertise that is genuinely distinctive and determine whether it can be turned into a commercial asset.

That might take the form of proprietary research, a methodology, diagnostic, assessment, benchmark, decision tool, or another tangible expression of the firm's expertise.

Then that credibility tool needs to be deployed.

A strong intellectual asset can provide a reason to approach a prospective client. It can give referral sources something tangible to talk about. It can support earned media and speaking opportunities, strengthen existing client relationships, and give prospective buyers credible evidence that the firm's expertise is more than a marketing claim.

In other words, intellectual capital shouldn't sit on a shelf or remain in someone's head. It should become part of the firm's business development capability.

Closing the Expertise Visibility Gap

This is the issue I call the Expertise Visibility Gap: the distance between what a consulting firm genuinely knows and what the outside world can actually see and understand about that expertise.

AI didn't create that gap. Many consulting firms have had it for years. But AI is making it much more consequential.

The opportunity for established consulting firms isn't to produce more AI-generated content in an attempt to keep pace.

The growth opportunity is to do something their less experienced competitors will find much harder to replicate: harvest the intellectual capital they've accumulated through real client experience, commercialize the most valuable pieces, and deploy those assets to build credibility and generate business.

In an environment where almost anyone can look like an expert, proving that you actually are one may become one of the most valuable competitive advantages a consulting firm can have.