Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy, M&A & Investments / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 10/ 11

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Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 10/ 11 · Best of LinkedIn: Strategy, M&A & Investments

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennus, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about strategy and consulting from CW-XN-Eleven.
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  Speaker 1: Frenness specializes in B to B market research for Strategy & Consulting teams with a focus on tech and ICT.
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  Speaker 0: Right, so welcome to today's deep dive.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah we are unpacking the top strategy and consulting trends that have been blowing up across LinkedIn over past two weeks.
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  Speaker 0: And if you're sitting in a boardroom right now or maybe a private equity firm Or a consulting partnership I mean The ground beneath your feet is just fundamentally shifting.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely!
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  Speaker 1: The big realization we're seeing everywhere is that you know the AI models?
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  Speaker 1: they aren't the bottleneck anymore.
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  Speaker 1: no
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  Speaker 0: not at all.
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  Speaker 1: it's the messy brutal reality of corporate politics legacy data and well just basic human resistance.
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  Speaker 1: yeah
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  Speaker 0: That's the real hurdle.
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  Speaker 1: exactly so today We're exploring how AIs completely rewiring Corporate strategy plus the death Of what people are calling lazy consulting
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  Speaker 0: right?
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  Speaker 0: And why?
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  Speaker 0: the biggest hurdles to this whole transformation Aren't technological at All.
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  Speaker 0: They're Human.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this.
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  Speaker 1: We're starting right at the top
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  Speaker 0: of printing a map once a year.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, highly centralized right?
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  Speaker 1: A small team locks themselves in a room for three months makes the plan and then it just sort of cascades
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  Speaker 0: down.
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  Speaker 0: exactly yeah but looking at recent insights from Nina Cady Eva and Michael Briggle at BCG.
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  Speaker 0: AI is turning that static map into a real-time GPS.
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  Speaker 1: I love that analogy because i mean a gps recalculates automatically when you hit traffic.
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  Speaker 1: Corporate strategy usually doesn't do that.
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  Speaker 1: It just waits until the Q three board meeting, you know?
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  Speaker 1: So how is this actually happening?
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  Speaker 1: well it
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  Speaker 0: comes down to sheer analytical bandwidth.
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  Speaker 0: Michael Brick shared some BCG data and The numbers are just massive.
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  Speaker 0: What are we
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  Speaker 1: looking at?
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  Speaker 0: they found That roughly eighty percent of typical Strategy tasks Are now highly exposed To AI automation.
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  Speaker 0: wait eighty percent.
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  Speaker 0: yeah eighty percent.
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  Speaker 0: We're talking the heavy lifting market research competitive analysis data synthesis.
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  Speaker 0: And when you remove the friction there, your moving strategy from this centralized planning thing to supercharged decentralized information gathering.
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  Speaker 1: Okay but if eighty percent of analytical work is exposed to AI You aren't just speeding things up Your breaking old org chart.
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  Speaker 0: Oh totally!
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  Speaker 0: You don't need a massive team of analysts spending month building market sizing deck If an AI agent can synthesize it in hour
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 0: So, organizations are realizing they need entirely new roles.
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  Speaker 0: Briggle points to the split between social strategists and technical strategies.
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  Speaker 1: Interesting!
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  Speaker 1: What's the difference?
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  Speaker 0: The technical strategist —they're architects—design decision systems in data pipelines But the social strategist is just as critical.
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  Speaker 0: Their job is handling buy-in adoption and navigating all emotional pushback to algorithmic decisions.
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  Speaker 1: I want to push back on that eighty percent number for a second though, if AI can do eighty percent of the analytical work our chief strategy officer is going become obsolete like... Do CSOs just babysit models now?
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  Speaker 1: Well
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  Speaker 0: what's fascinating here?
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  Speaker 0: how the mandate is shifting.
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  Speaker 0: Nick Jamison highlighted this Deloitte survey The twenty-twenty six Chief Strategy Officer Survey.
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  Speaker 1: Right!
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  Speaker 1: I saw it
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  Speaker 0: And It gets right to your point.
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  Speaker 0: Ninety five percent of CSOs expect AI to materially shape their priorities But only sixteen percent are actually using it to fundamentally reimagine their business.
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  Speaker 1: Sixteen percent so most of them or just what?
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  Speaker 1: stuck running little test projects exactly
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  Speaker 0: pilot purgatory.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, they're playing in a sandbox but They won't bet the core business on it
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  Speaker 0: and gigantrola expanded on this.
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  Speaker 0: AI is no longer just this enabling program sitting next to the business.
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  Speaker 0: It literally is the corporate strategy now, right?
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  Speaker 0: If CSOs just run fragmented pilots they drift into what Jameson calls random acts of AI
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  Speaker 1: Random acts of a man.
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  Speaker 1: you see that everywhere marketing buys a generative tool supply chain runs a pilot and none of it connects
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  Speaker 0: exactly Allie's.
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  Speaker 0: I added that CSOs have to leverage their confidence Right Now To close those capacity gaps.
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  Speaker 0: You Have to lead with AI to keep A competitive Edge.
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  Speaker 1: And if the way companies build strategy is fundamentally changing, then that consultants advising them have to evolve too right?
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  Speaker 0: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 0: The advisory model's getting completely upended
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  Speaker 1: Which brings us this super blunt observation from Shubham S. He just flat out said lazy consulting is dead.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah it really is.
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  Speaker 0: AI isn't killing consulting but its forcing it grow-up Because
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  Speaker 1: clients don't actually struggle with the AI models.
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  Speaker 1: The models are commoditized
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: they struggle in context the messy data, legacy systems and org politics.
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  Speaker 0: You can't just hand over a generic fifty-page slide deck anymore!
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  Speaker 1: So whole business model has to shift?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah.
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  Speaker 0: Thomas Granvik analyzed some research from Anthropic in KPMG about this... The traditional consulting leverage pyramid is collapsing… You
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  Speaker 1: mean where you have a few partners at top with an army of junior analysts billing hours on the
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  Speaker 1: bottom?!
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  Speaker 0: Exactly – that model relied on juniors doing heavy.
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  Speaker 0: Teams are restructuring now.
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  Speaker 1: Around the AI?
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  Speaker 0: Right, you have senior experts orchestrating AI agents instead.
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  Speaker 0: Rich Weber echoed this too.
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  Speaker 0: he said professionals won't do the repetitive work.
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  Speaker 0: they'll orchestrate fleets of AI tools doing it.
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  Speaker 0: Wow and The winning firms won't necessarily be the smallest but the ones with the highest ratio Of AI execution per human.
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  Speaker 1: okay here's where it gets really interesting though.
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  Speaker 1: yeah
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  Speaker 0: if the AI
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  Speaker 1: does all that entry-level data crunching and draft writing, how do junior consultants ever learn the ropes?
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  Speaker 0: That is the existential question right now.
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  Speaker 0: Right
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  Speaker 1: because the analyst years are where you build your pattern recognition.
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  Speaker 1: if you automate the bottom don't you break the training ground?
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  Speaker 0: well Casper Blick Simonson ran this really cool experiment to test the solution for that.
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  Speaker 0: he used AI to simulate an entire SAP design workshop.
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  Speaker 0: oh really but he didn't use the AI.
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  Speaker 0: He used it as the client.
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  Speaker 1: Wait, The AI acted.
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  Speaker 1: is a client stakeholder?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah!
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  Speaker 0: It acted as a difficult cross-functional client... ...it pushed back on KPIs, introduced department politics and forced him to defend his logic.
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  Speaker 0: Oh
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  Speaker 1: wow so its basically flight simulation for consultants.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly Its sandboxed for young consultants to practice structuring models before facing real world complexity.
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  Speaker 0: That's
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  Speaker 1: brilliant!
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  Speaker 1: You don't need them formatting Excel sheets for three years to learn.
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  Speaker 0: Right, though Christian Rauch makes a good point here technical configuration isn't enough anymore.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah it is just the baseline.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly consultants have to master business architecture and executive storytelling To actually get a seat at the strategy table.
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  Speaker 1: Speaking of getting a seat At The Table, Luke Smyers shared A crazy real-world case study on the power Of focus right now.
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  Speaker 0: Oh yeah!
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  Speaker 0: The firm that cut their services Yes...a
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  Speaker 1: consulting firm deliberately Cut thirty percent of its services Just chopped them to Focus purely On high complexity problems Which
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  Speaker 0: is terrifying for our partnership.
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  Speaker 1: Totally terrifying.
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  Speaker 1: They took a fourteen percent Revenue hit right out of the gate, but eighteen months later their overall profits were up sixteen percent.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah specificity and focus provide the ultimate risk protection in this era.
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  Speaker 0: But you know we have these grand visions of AI orchestration and focused consulting...but then it collides with actual company culture.
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  Speaker 1: Oh!
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  Speaker 1: The collision.
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  Speaker 0: Tanya W. gave this massive reality check, despite all the hype around autonomous agents, seventy to eighty percent of procurement teams are still running on Excel.
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  Speaker 0: ninety seven two thousand
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  Speaker 1: three It's wild!
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  Speaker 1: So what does that mean?
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  Speaker 1: Are companies just skipping a step?
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  Speaker 0: They kind-of ARE!
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  Speaker 0: Zal Rashidi shared data showing that seventy four to eighty eight percent of AI initiatives stop at proof concept phase.
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  Speaker 0: That
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  Speaker 1: is huge failure rate And
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  Speaker 0: it not tech failure but strategic readiness gap.
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  Speaker 1: It's like trying to put a sports car engine into a horse-drawn carriage.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly!
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  Speaker 0: The power is there, but the structure can't handle it.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, Cabra points out that building these AI centers of excellence... ...is actually an org navigation challenge.
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  Speaker 1: Right because if funding sits in a central innovation hub But delivery accountability sits out on business units
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  Speaker 0: Then you just get drifted.
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  Speaker 0: The alignment completely breaks down.
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  Speaker 0: Brian Elliott warns that AI simply magnifies your existing
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  Speaker 0: culture."
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  Speaker 1: Oh, that makes sense!
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  Speaker 0: If you're a cultural reward's mere activity over actual outcomes... ...AI just speeds up the treadmill.
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  Speaker 1: You get more noise More drafts More emails No value
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: And Jim Rowan emphasized That you have to deliberately design the relationship between humans and machines.
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  Speaker 0: Also You have hard-wired decision rights and psychological safety.
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  Speaker 0: Otherwise, organizations just accumulate toxic cultural debt.
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  Speaker 0: Toxic
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  Speaker 1: cultural debt?
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  Speaker 1: I like that phrase!
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  Speaker 1: But how is this rapid shift impacting the actual humans doing their
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  Speaker 1: work?".
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  Speaker 0: It's intense... David Edelman and Julie Boudard talked about this concept of AI brain fry.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah it's the mental fatigue from overseeing AI beyond your natural cognitive capacity.
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  Speaker 0: Reviewing all that synthetic output just burns people out,
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  Speaker 1: frying their circuit
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  Speaker 0: exactly.
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  Speaker 0: but Robert and Baldy had some interesting conversations with energy CFOs about this.
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  Speaker 0: Eighty percent of them are designing AI into the workforce okay?
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  Speaker 0: But they're true.
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  Speaker 0: focus is actually retaining human skills.
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  Speaker 1: wait really not cutting headcount.
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  Speaker 0: no there using zero-touch automation as a retention strategy want to eliminate the drudgery so we keep our best people engaged.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, that changes the investment thesis entirely.
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  Speaker 1: So how do the investors like private equity firms underwrite this kind of transformation?
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  Speaker 1: Well,
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  Speaker 0: Tophic Hammett touched on that.
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  Speaker 0: PE firms can't just hand out AI licenses and expect higher returns.
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  Speaker 1: right you Can't Just buy a sauce tool And walk away
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  Speaker 0: exactly.
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  Speaker 0: lasting value comes from totally reshaping The operating models but the foundational rules of finance still apply.
• 9:53
  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: Tim Vipond highlighted This.
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  Speaker 0: You Still Need A Structured Decision Tree for valuation.
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  Speaker 0: Methods like DCF, COMPS and precedent transactions remain critical anchors.
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  Speaker 1: So all these AI insights still have to translate into classic financial frameworks?
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  Speaker 0: They have too.
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  Speaker 0: you can't ignore the math.
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  Speaker 1: What about external risks though?
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  Speaker 1: The macro environment feels incredibly volatile right now Like geopolitical risk.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah And just be clear for your listening We're strictly reporting market observations here.
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  Speaker 0: we are not endorsing any political stances Absolutely!
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: We are strictly impartial.
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  Speaker 0: But Alyssa Lugo warns that corporate boards have to adapt their governance, to handle this geopolitical volatility and sociopolitical polarization.
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  Speaker 1: What's an example of that in technical diligence?
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  Speaker 0: AJ Green reported on a clash where the Pentagon pressured Anthropic to strip safety guardrails for military use... Wow!
• 10:45
  Speaker 0: ...and at the same time foreign labs are trying to clone their models.
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  Speaker 1: That is massive risk.
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  Speaker 1: if your target company has built one those models
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: Evan Benjamin also noted the quit GPT movement where users migrated to Claude over political and ethical concerns.
• 11:00
  Speaker 0: Right, again we aren't taking a side but for M&A and strategy professionals tool loyalty ethics And geopolitical exposure are now massive variables
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  Speaker 1: because if you acquire a company and their AI vendor suddenly faces a boycott or government restriction Your investment is toast.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly, which brings us to a final provocative thought from David Pizzley regarding decision intelligence.
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  Speaker 1: Okay what's that?
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  Speaker 0: Well if the future of enterprise architecture is heavily automated maybe the ultimate competitive advantage isn't being AI first.
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  Speaker 0: What is it then?
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  Speaker 0: Being decisions centric?
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  Speaker 0: If AI eventually determines everyone's baseline strategy The only true edge left Is human capacity to govern those systems.
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  Speaker 1: Ah!
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  Speaker 1: To ask the questions that AI hasn't even thought of.
• 11:44
  Speaker 0: Exactly, That's a real differentiator going forward.
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  Speaker 1: I love it.
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  Speaker 1: The human is the ultimate edge.
• 11:50
  Speaker 0: Yeah
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: Also check out our other editions on Private Equity Venture Capital and M&A.
• 11:58
  Speaker 0: Thanks so much for joining us!
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Thank You And don't forget to subscribe.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: Catch you in the next deep dive.