The AI-enabled firm of the future
A working session for the Business Advisory team on where AI changes the practice and where it does not.
- Services
- Offsite session
- Period
- Jun 2026
- Format
- 90 minutes with the Business Advisory team, built on the team's own pre-session survey
Thirteen people, thirteen different starting points
The firm's Business Advisory team surveyed itself before the offsite. Thirteen people answered. Self-reported AI integration into their work averaged about thirty percent and ranged from five percent to eighty.
All thirteen used Microsoft Copilot. About a third also used Claude. Nearly all of the use was first drafts: emails, rewording something for an executive audience, decks, proposals. The team's number-one ask was agents and automation, which was the part none of them had reached.
The head of the practice set the brief. Show the team how a consultant should think with the tools they will realistically have in the short to medium term, and answer what they should be doing to stay ahead.
Start from their own numbers
The session was built on the survey rather than on a standard deck. The team's own answers went on a slide near the front, and the rest of the session was set against them.
The head of the practice approved the agenda as proposed — this looks bang on
— and asked for one addition: show how an experienced consultant would work with the tools the team already has, not the ones coming later.
So the middle third was a live demonstration rather than screenshots. Real workflows, run in front of the room, including the agent and automation work the survey had asked for. The last third was a roundtable, not a question-and-answer session.
Ninety minutes in three parts
The three parts were roughly equal in length. The session closed on four points rather than a set of recommendations, and the follow-up materials went out the same afternoon.
- Part 1 — Macro
- Where the tools have got to, and what that changes for professional services work.
- Part 2 — Live
- An AI-native consulting stack demonstrated live: the actual workflows in use, including the agent and automation work the team had asked about.
- Part 3 — Roundtable
- An open discussion on where consulting is heading, led by the team rather than from the front of the room.
- Close
- Four points: agree your AI strategy now; get policy and governance right at the outset; go beyond the obvious uses; it is easier than it looks.
- Sent the same day
- The slides, a resources page, a written report on the future of consulting, and a short feedback survey.
The team started piloting
The team began piloting Claude in the weeks after the session.
The survey had shown a wide spread in how much the team used AI. The session gave all thirteen the same reference point to plan against.
It closed with three questions for the team rather than an answer: what this means for Business Advisory, what needs to shift, and what its winning aspiration should be.
The session came out of a coaching engagement with one partner in the same practice earlier that year. The practice asked for it; it was not pitched.
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Strata: Ashes Sitoula — Unsplash