Latest / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy, M&A & Investments / Best of LinkedIn: Strategy & Consulting CW 14/ 15
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Provided by Thomas Allgeier and Frennus, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about strategy in consulting from CW-IV and XV.
- 0:08Speaker 1: Frenness is a B to B market research company supporting consultancies with the Market & Competition perspective for example in commercial due delegances CDD.
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- 0:31Speaker 1: you can find more info in the description.
- 0:33Speaker 0: yeah honestly that kind of operational speed is exactly what we're gonna be unpacking today
- 0:38Speaker 1: right?
- 0:38Speaker 1: I mean imagine waking up at like six AM finding out your biggest competitor just outbid you.
- 0:45Speaker 1: But before you even pour your coffee, Your AI agent has already analyzed their move and it's repriced to your outstanding proposals.
- 0:51Speaker 0: It sounds totally like a sci-fi thought experiment right?
- 0:53Speaker 0: But its actually an employed workflow happening now in professional services!
- 0:58Speaker 1: So welcome to this deep dive.
- 1:00Speaker 1: today we are exploring the top strategy and consulting trends across M&A private equity and venture capital And we pulled straight from conversations dominating LinkedIn Right Now
- 1:11Speaker 0: Exactly Because we are looking at, well a fundamental rewiring of how these sectors operate.
- 1:19Speaker 0: Yeah Like the conversation is completely moved past the initial AI hype cycle.
- 1:23Speaker 1: yeah We're not just talking about what these tools might do someday
- 1:26Speaker 0: right now?
- 1:26Speaker 0: We're looking at how top-tier firms or actively tearing down their legacy models you know restructuring pricing and ironically enough placing an unprecedented premium on raw human judgments.
- 1:39Speaker 0: I
- 1:39Speaker 1: love that And I want to start by just, you know throwing out the old playbook entirely because The first major shift we are seeing is Just the death of static strategy.
- 1:47Speaker 0: Oh absolutely.
- 1:48Speaker 0: The traditional cycle Is collapsing under its own weight Right
- 1:51Speaker 1: like that old corporate planning Cycle where leadership just vanishes To some off-site retreat in November and then they produce this beautifully formatted fifty page PDF In January
- 2:01Speaker 0: Which they then blindly execute for twelve months.
- 2:04Speaker 0: It's too slow.
- 2:05Speaker 1: Yeah, the market moves way too fast for a yearly PDF.
- 2:08Speaker 0: Honestly by the time that document even clears the final compliance review The macroeconomic assumptions it's built on are usually completely obsolete Which
- 2:17Speaker 1: is why Ben Jones over at PA Consulting Is championing this really cool concept of live strategy.
- 2:22Speaker 0: Oh yeah I saw using AI agents to monitor global market signals, twenty-four seven.
- 2:27Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 2:28Speaker 1: But the mechanism of how they actually test this strategy is what really caught my eye.
- 2:32Speaker 1: Jones talks about using... he calls them synthetic personas and vibe coded prototypes
- 2:37Speaker 0: which are such a wild term vibe coated prototype.
- 2:40Speaker 1: it's just to clarify for you listening A synthetic persona isn't just your traditional buyer persona.
- 2:46Speaker 1: slide with a stock photo and fake name.
- 2:49Speaker 0: Right, they're not making up marketing merit.
- 2:51Speaker 0: No
- 2:51Speaker 1: firms are using large language models trained on massive lakes of their actual customer behavioral data.
- 2:57Speaker 1: you know support tickets purchasing history.
- 3:00Speaker 1: They build highly nuanced digital twins of the actual customer base
- 3:04Speaker 0: Which changes entire feedback loop.
- 3:07Speaker 0: I mean instead spending six months in millions dollars building product Just to see if it resonates.
- 3:12Speaker 1: You just run it through the synthetic personas instantly.
- 3:16Speaker 0: Right, The AI simulates thousands of complex customer reactions.
- 3:20Speaker 0: It stress tests the move before you ever deploy real capital
- 3:24Speaker 1: And the vibe-coded prototypes.
- 3:26Speaker 1: take a step further.
- 3:27Speaker 1: Because you aren't debating bullet points on us anymore.
- 3:31Speaker 1: The AI rapidly spins up functional mockups or entirely synthesized brand campaigns
- 3:37Speaker 0: So the stakeholders can actually interact with a strategy in real time.
- 3:40Speaker 1: Exactly, they get a visceral feel for the direction not just this dry intellectual understanding.
- 3:46Speaker 0: and when you scale that capability up to the executive suite The role of leadership completely transforms.
- 3:52Speaker 0: like You.
- 3:52Speaker 0: stop spending board meetings looking at the rearview mirror.
- 3:54Speaker 1: Yeah no more debating last quarter's variance against a plan built a year ago.
- 3:58Speaker 0: Right the executive conversation becomes a live response to signals happening today.
- 4:03Speaker 0: The AI synthesizes the market noise, flags the anomalies that actually matter and just it frees up cognitive load so leaders can focus on the horizon.
- 4:13Speaker 1: Okay but I have to play devil's advocate here for a second.
- 4:15Speaker 1: if your strategy is entirely alive aren't we just inviting absolute chaos?
- 4:21Speaker 0: How do you mean?
- 4:22Speaker 1: Well, it sounds dangerously close to day trading your corporate strategy.
- 4:26Speaker 1: Like You see a trending topic on social media the AI flags at competitors press release and suddenly you're pivoting Your entire supply chain On a random Tuesday afternoon.
- 4:35Speaker 0: that is yeah.
- 4:36Speaker 0: That's the most critical risk of adopting this model And it forces a much deeper question about what a corporation actually optimizing for pure go bro shared some deeply relevant insights.
- 4:46Speaker 0: looking at the GCC that addresses this tension perfectly.
- 4:49Speaker 1: Oh, the Gulf Cooperation Council right?
- 4:51Speaker 1: Yeah
- 4:51Speaker 0: he points out that for the last decade corporate strategy was utterly obsessed with just one metric which is efficiency.
- 4:58Speaker 1: Right!
- 4:58Speaker 1: The whole lean management era strip-out the fat eliminate redundancy minimize inventory
- 5:03Speaker 0: Which is a fantastic strategy if you live in a perfectly stable world.
- 5:07Speaker 0: But the reality of a live strategy means you are hyper aware of market shocks.
- 5:12Speaker 0: So Goebbrel argues we have to shift from pure efficiency toward resilience and
- 5:17Speaker 0: anti-fragility.".
- 5:18Speaker 1: So what does that look like in practice?
- 5:20Speaker 0: Well, he uses this Strait Of Hormuz crisis as real world stress test.
- 5:25Speaker 0: when tanker traffic in that region plummeted by ninety percent The companies running those highly centralized ultra lean operations were completely paralyzed.
- 5:35Speaker 0: they had zero buffer.
- 5:36Speaker 1: Oh wow, so the pursuit of maximum efficiency is actually what made them fragile.
- 5:40Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 5:41Speaker 0: The organizations that actually thrive in this environment.
- 5:44Speaker 0: they don't day trade their strategy based on every little blip.
- 5:47Speaker 0: They use live signals to build strategic redundancy.
- 5:50Speaker 1: Ah, okay.
- 5:51Speaker 1: so intentionally absorbing the costs of localized capabilities and supply chain buffers?
- 5:56Speaker 0: Right it's a fundamental shift from an just-in time philosophy to adjusting case philosophy.
- 6:00Speaker 0: The live strategy gives you early warning And antifragile structure ensures that you survive it and capture market share while your lean competitors are scrambling.
- 6:09Speaker 1: Okay, so if corporate strategy needs to be that alive and that resilient then the consulting firms and private equity advisors guiding these companies have a massive
- 6:17Speaker 0: problem.
- 6:18Speaker 0: Oh!
- 6:18Speaker 0: A total structural collapse of their traditional model?
- 6:20Speaker 1: Yeah because you cannot advise a real-time live strategy corporation If your own operating model requires a twelve week engagement cycle just to mobilize a team.
- 6:31Speaker 0: Right, Gaz Tahr framed this beautifully on LinkedIn.
- 6:33Speaker 0: He calls AI a meteor for the consulting industry.
- 6:37Speaker 1: I love that analogy, it's like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
- 6:39Speaker 1: Exactly!
- 6:40Speaker 0: The fundamental laws of business physics haven't changed but the species that survive this impact are going to look completely different.
- 6:47Speaker 0: He says.
- 6:48Speaker 0: the industry built its fortunes on baking pies.
- 6:51Speaker 0: Massive
- 6:51Speaker 1: monolithic labor intensive engagements Like dozens of consultants over many months.
- 6:56Speaker 0: But client appetite has fundamentally changed.
- 7:01Speaker 0: it demands cupcakes.
- 7:03Speaker 1: Cupcakes, yes!
- 7:04Speaker 1: Clients want smaller highly modular incredibly fast outcome-driven work.
- 7:09Speaker 1: they want a problem solved in three weeks not a sprawling transformation program that takes three years.
- 7:14Speaker 0: and delivering cupcakes completely breaks the traditional consulting pyramid
- 7:18Speaker 1: because the old model relies on a partner at the top selling Passing it down to managers
- 7:24Speaker 0: who then leverage an army of junior analysts and offshore developers at the bottom To actually grind out the deliverables.
- 7:31Speaker 0: It naturally creates this massive telephone game Of information loss,
- 7:35Speaker 1: right?
- 7:36Speaker 1: The strategic intent gets totally diluted by the time it Meaches the junior analyst formatting the slides
- 7:41Speaker 0: exactly so Rupesh Dandekar Proposes a new framework that entirely bypasses This he calls with the intelligence arbitrage POD
- 7:50Speaker 1: .This is such a cool concept.
- 7:51Speaker 1: Walk us through how a POD actually functions like on a Tuesday afternoon.
- 7:56Speaker 0: Okay, so instead of deploying a twenty-person team you deploy highly concentrated PODs just three to five senior practitioners partners or directors with deep battle tested domain expertise.
- 8:07Speaker 0: Right
- 8:07Speaker 1: because they know exactly what broken processes look Like.
- 8:10Speaker 1: They don't need a month To conduct interviews
- 8:12Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 8:13Speaker 0: They drop directly into the client environment and Instead of delegating to junior staff They use advanced AI agents to execute the grunt work themselves.
- 8:22Speaker 0: They analyze financial models, draft technical requirements and generate dashboards
- 8:27Speaker 0: autonomously.".
- 8:27Speaker 1: So they're compressing a three-month twenty person engagement into a three week sprint just by scaling their own senior judgment.
- 8:35Speaker 1: instead of human headcount?
- 8:37Speaker 0: The AI becomes the leverage!
- 8:39Speaker 0: The Senior Partner is suddenly doing the work of ten analysts but with thirty years of strategic context applied.
- 8:47Speaker 1: But wait, here is where the entire business model hits a wall.
- 8:50Speaker 1: If a senior partner finishes their work in three weeks instead of three months... The traditional time and materials billing structure completely implodes!
- 8:57Speaker 0: Oh it's a disaster for billable
- 8:59Speaker 1: hours….
- 8:59Speaker 1: Right if you bill by hour deploying AI means that your aggressively penalizing yourself for being efficient—the faster you deliver – the less money you make.
- 9:07Speaker 0: It is an existential pricing crisis.
- 9:09Speaker 0: Rajeev Pazhai points out many firms are panicking trying to pivot directly into saucepricing
- 9:14Speaker 1: treating consulting services like a fixed monthly software subscription.
- 9:18Speaker 1: Yeah,
- 9:18Speaker 0: which completely ignores how professional services actually work.
- 9:22Speaker 0: SAAS assumes as standardized repeatable product but in M&A advisory value is co-created with the client
- 9:29Speaker 1: Right.
- 9:29Speaker 1: if the clients internal data isn't absolute disaster.
- 9:32Speaker 1: A standardized AI tool isn't going to save engagement.
- 9:36Speaker 1: You can offer flat subscription fee when the client side variables are that volatile.
- 9:41Speaker 0: It'll destroy your margins.
- 9:42Speaker 0: So Uppani suggests the industry will land on a hybrid model to survive.
- 9:46Speaker 0: You charge a fixed base fee that covers the premium, human elements governance accountability strategic judgment
- 9:52Speaker 1: and then you attach bounded outcome components.
- 9:55Speaker 0: exactly because AI makes The execution highly predictable.
- 9:58Speaker 0: firms can confidently tie A big portion of their fees To measurable KPIs like specific cost reduction percentages And
- 10:05Speaker 1: the pressure to restructure around this is intense.
- 10:08Speaker 1: James Ardoud highlighted that PWC just merged its global risk and consulting businesses into one platform.
- 10:15Speaker 1: We're talking about twenty four billion dollars in revenue
- 10:17Speaker 0: massive integration, And the official corporate line cited client complexity.
- 10:22Speaker 0: but O'Dowd hit the nail on the head.
- 10:24Speaker 0: It happened because AI compresses delivery times so drastically right.
- 10:29Speaker 1: clients won't tolerate slow internal hand-offs between silo departments anymore.
- 10:33Speaker 1: if The tech integrates this solution in seconds.
- 10:35Speaker 1: the organization has to match that
- 10:37Speaker 0: And delivering these rapid outcomes requires a radically different approach to technology, like we are moving way beyond just pasting text into a chat interface.
- 10:46Speaker 0: Oh
- 10:46Speaker 1: the tooling evolution is staggering!
- 10:49Speaker 1: Some do make an outline this practical workflow replacing traditional analysts.
- 10:53Speaker 1: You start with Gemini to rapidly synthesize external market search.
- 10:56Speaker 0: Then you feed those insights onto a Chat GPT Excel plugin.
- 11:00Speaker 0: So it acts as a quantitative junior analyst.
- 11:02Speaker 1: Yeah, you can literally converse with your financial models to spot anomalies.
- 11:06Speaker 1: then You use lovable which is a rapid prototyping tool To spin up tangible software interfaces instantly.
- 11:11Speaker 0: but the client visualizes The solution immediately rather than looking at wireframes.
- 11:15Speaker 0: and finally Claude steps in to generate the highly visual branded slide narratives.
- 11:21Speaker 1: It's a huge productivity leap But it is still fundamentally linear.
- 11:25Speaker 1: Indra Prasad-Godtok's approach takes us into the next paradigm.
- 11:28Speaker 1: Right,
- 11:29Speaker 0: he built that structured external brain a private ecosystem detailing all his proprietary frameworks and past project successes.
- 11:36Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 11:37Speaker 1: So when a massive RFP lands on his desk His AI assistant accesses that external brain And drafts a tailored response in about forty minutes.
- 11:47Speaker 1: But the autonomous agent he built is The Real Game Changer.
- 11:50Speaker 0: The one that reads the news at six a.m.. Yes,
- 11:52Speaker 1: it monitors regional news and competitor press releases.
- 11:55Speaker 1: overnight It woke him up with a briefing that a competitor was opening A local AI office in a city where He Was bidding.
- 12:02Speaker 1: Wow And he had the intelligence to completely reprice his proposals and secure local partnerships before His very first client meeting of the day.
- 12:11Speaker 0: That perfectly illustrates a critical warning from Matthias Elcesser regarding the AI bubble.
- 12:16Speaker 0: He notes that, The vast majority of corporate world is still stuck in one-to-one relationship with AI.
- 12:22Speaker 0: A human types of prompt?
- 12:23Speaker 0: The machine gives an output
- 12:24Speaker 1: It's faster but it's still linear
- 12:26Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 12:27Speaker 0: The organizations will achieve exponential dominance are runs building what he calls end to M systems
- 12:33Speaker 1: meaning multiple humans interacting with multiple autonomous agents.
- 12:37Speaker 0: An agentic ecosystem, one senior partner orchestrates five specialized AI agents.
- 12:43Speaker 0: they independently query databases draft code and crucially the interact with each other.
- 12:48Speaker 0: They validate work and challenge assumptions without human intervention.
- 12:52Speaker 1: Okay, I have to jump in here because the idea of an agent-to-agent economy is fascinating but also kind of terrifying.
- 12:59Speaker 1: How
- 12:59Speaker 0: so?
- 12:59Speaker 1: Well if my firm deploys an end-to-'em system And...my client deploys one We essentially have bots negotiating with bots.
- 13:07Speaker 1: It sounds exactly like algorithmic trading on Wall Street where two bots get confused and trigger a flash crash that wipes out billions.
- 13:13Speaker 1: Yeah, if my digital twin and a vendor's digital twins start independently negotiating a master services agreement aren't we just accelerating towards a hallucinated disaster?
- 13:22Speaker 1: That nobody actually authorized.
- 13:24Speaker 0: it's a profound structural risk.
- 13:26Speaker 0: Peter Jonathan Jameson explored the dark side of this agent to agent economy And he warns have too massive pitfalls.
- 13:34Speaker 0: The first is the trust deficit.
- 13:36Speaker 0: Trust
- 13:36Speaker 1: stuff's it, meaning what exactly?
- 13:37Speaker 0: In M&A private equity and consulting trust is the actual product being sold.
- 13:43Speaker 0: An AI agent can perfectly mimic your tone in format emails but it cannot replicate genuine human intent.
- 13:51Speaker 0: you can't build a resilient client relationship through proxy bots.
- 13:54Speaker 1: right when things go wrong a client needs to look a human in the eye
- 13:58Speaker 0: Exactly!
- 13:58Speaker 0: And The second risk Jameson points out might be even more dangerous long term...the learning paradox.
- 14:04Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
- 14:05Speaker 0: Professional growth in these high-stakes environments is entirely driven by discomfort.
- 14:10Speaker 0: a junior analyst learns to read the room By sitting at a tense negotiation.
- 14:14Speaker 0: A manager develops judgment by navigating pushback from a hostile stakeholder.
- 14:18Speaker 1: So friction is the mechanism For building expertise.
- 14:21Speaker 0: Yes so if we deploy AI agents To absorb all of daily friction Drafting tough emails Smoothing over data discrepancies Low level negotiations We remove the mechanism Of learning.
- 14:31Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
- 14:32Speaker 1: So if junior professionals never experience the friction how do they ever develop this strategic judgment required to become senior partners?
- 14:40Speaker 0: We risk creating a lost generation of professionals who know how to prompt an AI but have zero intrinsic judgement.
- 14:52Speaker 1: brings us to the ultimate constraint in fields like M&A and private equity.
- 14:56Speaker 1: AI gives you speed, but it cannot manufacture courage trust or strategic honesty.
- 15:01Speaker 0: Exactly.
- 15:02Speaker 0: Tanya W brought up a chilling point about how this plays out in procurement and due diligence.
- 15:07Speaker 1: Yeah, she said the biggest risk isn't just hallucinations because those are easy to spot.
- 15:11Speaker 1: if you're paying attention The much more insidious threat is AI bias validating bad human decisions
- 15:16Speaker 0: The confirmation bias loop.
- 15:18Speaker 1: Precisely Let's say an executive has a gut feeling they want to acquire specific target.
- 15:23Speaker 1: They feed that biased premise into an AI agent.
- 15:26Speaker 1: The AI doesn't challenge the
- 15:27Speaker 0: premise.
- 15:28Speaker 0: It just instantly generates a beautifully formatted, deeply convincing fifty-page due diligence report supporting it.
- 15:35Speaker 1: Right!
- 15:35Speaker 1: It adds illusion of rigorous math to bad idea without actually adding any objective truth.
- 15:41Speaker 0: And in past A poorly thought out M&A thesis usually looked messy.
- 15:47Speaker 0: Spreadsheet had errors Narrative was thin.
- 15:50Speaker 0: Today bad decisions look dangerously polished.
- 15:54Speaker 1: So if an investment committee won't aggressively challenge a flawlessly written AI report, billions get deployed based on very fast highly confident utterly wrong assumptions
- 16:05Speaker 0: which completely elevates the premium.
- 16:09Speaker 0: Tobias Blazer shared a perfect example regarding private equity firms executing carve-outs of family owned businesses.
- 16:15Speaker 1: Right, because family business don't usually fail from bad strategy.
- 16:18Speaker 1: they fail because no one challenges the sacred cows!
- 16:21Speaker 0: Exactly.
- 16:22Speaker 0: and internal employees never gonna walk into the boardroom until The Founding Family need to sell off the legacy plant their grandfather built.
- 16:28Speaker 0: it's political suicide
- 16:29Speaker 1: And an AI agent can highlight the inefficiency in seconds but It Can't Look A Proud Founder In The Eye and Navigate The Emotional Weight Of That Legacy?
- 16:38Speaker 0: That requires immense human courage and empathy.
- 16:41Speaker 0: Jonathan Flack highlighted another deeply human limitation when advising family offices on location strategy.
- 16:48Speaker 1: Yeah, choosing a location isn't just a mathematical optimization problem for tax rates.
- 16:52Speaker 0: Right Does the location align with the families culture?
- 16:55Speaker 0: Can you attract a star chief investment officer who actually wants to move their life into that city?
- 17:00Speaker 0: An AI agent optimizing for tax efficiency does not care where your kids go to school.
- 17:05Speaker 1: The human factors ultimately dictate the success and Tiger Tiagrajean and Antonio Cusimano synthesize this perfectly,
- 17:15Speaker 0: because AI flattens the execution layer.
- 17:18Speaker 0: Anyone with the right tools can crunch the data and build the slides now.
- 17:21Speaker 1: So execution isn't the bottleneck anymore, The real leadership differentiators are now deeply human traits authentic connection inclusive listening intense curiosity And the courage to provoke uncomfortable thinking in your clients.
- 17:35Speaker 0: AI handles that tactical heavy lifting but the leaders of tomorrow master the vision and the relationships.
- 17:42Speaker 0: as we wrap up this exploration of live strategy, the meteor hitting consulting want to leave you with one final thought.
- 17:48Speaker 0: To consider
- 17:49Speaker 1: let's hear it
- 17:50Speaker 0: if AI agents are constantly monitoring market signals and evaluating competitor moves twenty four seven then The entire concept of the traditional deal cycle is dead.
- 18:00Speaker 1: wait really?
- 18:00Speaker 1: The whole deal cycle.
- 18:01Speaker 1: yeah
- 18:02Speaker 0: in M&A due diligence has always been a frantic thirty-day sprint after signing a letter of intent.
- 18:08Speaker 0: But if your end-to-end system is continuously analyzing every target in real time, due diligence no longer an event.
- 18:15Speaker 0: It's a continuous stream!
- 18:16Speaker 1: Oh wow so you're effectively underwriting companies months before they even go up for sale?
- 18:20Speaker 0: Exactly consider this what happens to your market share when you already know the exact value of a Target Before The Investment Bank Even prints the teaser?
- 18:28Speaker 0: yeah You can't just optimize the past anymore.
- 18:32Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.
- 18:36Speaker 1: Also check out our other editions on private equity Venture Capital and M&A.
- 18:40Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to This Deep Dive And don't forget to subscribe!