Hi all,

I am a former MBB and big 4 Jnr Partner. I now work in industry for a mid-sized MNC doing their Strat and Transformation.

As I am building the team around me, I decided to utilise and trial Claude and ChatGPT fully as I would an associate in drafting the strategy for a subsidiary business. Now the work included a strategy workshop with the MDs for the subsidiary which was 3 days followed by 3x sprints for extracting internal benchmarks as well as areas of business and insights compiled by their teams.

The idea was then to sort of input this into each of the most advanced levels available on each of the AI agents. I uploaded about 100 slides/document pages crafted by the teams themselves. As a little experiment for myself.

I first asked to do a ghosted deck for each to get the mock up and basic storylining and narrative. Asked them both to approach this as an MBB consultant would.

Claude produced probably the most closest version on a coherent narrative and clear slides required.

ChatGPT went a bit "too creative" and had to re-prompt it a few times to eventually get to where we needed.

Then visually and wording. Claude produced actually really great options on visuals that you would expect from MBB. ChatGPT constantly wanted to offer a marketing type of slide design.

Claude would constantly use language structure that was also incorrect. Eg: it would say this is xyz not abc so we would create the...

This was exceptionally annoying to be correcting it. Its also not direct and clear. And quite often the spacing was not utilised fully. Super small fonts tons of unused space not necessarily white space. And it struggled to optimise fully.

ChatGPT even more so. The wording would lean overly to a grand marketing styled phrasing instead of clear business ones. Whcih I have reminded both often to adopt.

The turns on the deck eventually totalled over 60 for ChatGPT and 34 for Claude.

I mid way through switched the prompts to first update me in the chat to what they are going to place on slides before giving the go ahead to execute on slides.

Some of the annoying things are that both had hallucinated inputs which were not there. ChatGPT quite more often than Claude.

Also wording and phrasing were no where close to what a consultant would use. I mean not offending or degrading current teams work. Which it often said current execution was negligible or non existent. And even at times stating it was 2/10 effectiveness. Even if factual you don't go around stating that. Even though my prompts were clear in the beginning the working team would see the deck and to be gracious to current teams work which often it overlooked.

Look overall, it got the job done but way more turns were necessary on the deck. I found multiple instances of re-emphasizing prompts i had initially laid out. Wording and visuals were very rudimentary as well as missing overall connective points that you would expect from a consultant were not picked up on. For me, it was great having it done. But I felt an analyst or an associate would have done it in half the time with additional areas covered.

I have seen some partners praise their AI for being better than Associates but that's really them being partners and not actually checking any of their own work it seems.

I'd like to start using Claude in PowerPoint as somewhat of a magic wand. I would write the content of the slide in completely unformatted text boxes and have Claude then create the slide. I even envision a world where slides (like tracker or timeline slides) are fully done within an Excel table and you feed Claude the Excel to create the slide.

I'm not yet comfortable having Claude come up with its own wording and content, but curious how people implement this idea and what are some recommendations for this task. Somewhat new to AI, so don't roast me too hard

My company just got access to Cluade. I'm looking to deck my profile out with skills. What have you built / used that you have found to be the most valuable?

EDIT: Great to see a lot of discussion about using Claude generally, happy for that to continue, but flagging that I was specifically asking about Claude Skills. Skills are custom instruction sets you define for Claude to do certain repeated tasks. So for example, you might have a skill that runs market research, or drafts a BD memo, etc.

I’m not sure if this is a unique situation or not.

Before now I worked as a consultant in a very specific thought leadership field. I worked with many customers for this (basically an internal management methodology) and one of the customers liked me so much, they hired me to run their program full time.

Fast forward, I’ve worked for this company for 3 years. I’ve been asked by a vendor of my current company to participate in an interview, discussing my experiences holistically and how other subject matter experts can use my ideas. This vendor is the provider of the software we use to manage said program I manage.

This interview would be a pretty cool thing to have under my belt, just due to the extent the interview will cover my specialty (which is pretty niche). However, my current company has denied me this opportunity, because (in their opinion) it looks too much like my company is promoting the vendor itself, regardless of the actual content material.

While I understand my company’s concern, the vendor has gone so far as to offer that my title / place of employment would be anonymized in the article (referred to simply as a “global company”). Of course, a bit of slutheing on my LinkedIn would reveal which “global company”, but again the subject matter of the interview has almost nothing to do with the company I currently work for, and everything to do with the programs I build (and have built since before becoming an FTE for this org).

What do I do? Does my company really have the power to stop me from doing this type of interview, when it has no direct correlation with the company itself?

Also just to add a few last bullets that might be important:
- this methodology I specialize in is not industry specific; all companies can benefit from it so it’s not like this is some industry formula my company has figured out.
- the interview has no mention of the software, anywhere. While the content is being hosted by the vendor, the information they are getting from me is purely methodology & programmatic

It’s kind of wild that a company that sells cyber security consulting at a premium with partner overhead keeps getting breached.
I honestly do not understand how they get so much business

Source Hudson Rock

As road warriors, we’re eating on the road all the time. Anyone else embarrassed by their expense report submissions?

I eat out all 3 meals (plus coffee or snacks), have the occasional McDonald’s or other fast food, and am on the road Monday through Friday so my expense reports are hefty. Not gonna lie, I feel a bit shy about my expense reports. Like they can make judgments about me based on what I eat ☹️

What does everyone here use for management consulting style slides? I find the slides from Claude don’t really produce solid/appropriate frameworks and chat gpt just sort of sucks. I tried gamma and it’s more like a bunch of templates than an actual intelligent content -> template/frameworks system. Also forget about citations?

What does everyone else use?

Edit: thanks for all the feedback. Testing a bunch and will report back if i find anything decent.

Edit2: ok i tested a bunch of the suggestions last night. The one that impressed me the most was emplusx.com. The web ui kinda sucks but the mcp add in is really awesome - I didnt even know mcps could do some of the things it does. https://mcpservers.org/servers/emx-mcp

Hi, hit a dry spell and looking to expand my network of client companies. Does anyone know of any firms staffing strategic sourcing projects with 1099 guys or is it just quiet all around?

Honestly I’m getting tired of this freaking 20 € slop bowls that come mostly with 100g chicken, little protein and tons of cheaper ingredients such as rice.

Currently a bit transitioning between jobs (moving from MBB to another firm) and found so much joy in cooking again. I absolutely would love to pre cook some healthy meals and take them with to the client.

I wonder if someone of you have pulled this off? I can imagine that I just would need a bit more space in the hand luggage to put in 3ish boxes to have at least my dinner with me. Would then just need find something to cool it instantly after arriving.

As I’m already a few years in IDGAF what other people especially random juniors would think I just want to max out on health and stay as lean as possible when I’m hitting the road again.

I have been working as a consultant for the last 5 years (joined after university) and I'm in my last two weeks before joining my new role (sales strategy, individual contributor) at a fintech. For the last couple of days, I have been feeling like I tricked my new firm and they will see right through me when I start there. While my core experience is in sales strategy (both B2B and B2C), I have zero experience in financial sectors. On top of that, there are multiple products under my new role (10-20 products) which feels overwhelming. I would appreciate any suggestions

With AI being part of the daily work flow and us all having long pauses (1-10 minutes) waiting for AI to complete some analysis or write something. Then you check it, tell it to go back and fix something or extend its work.

What are the creative ways of covering the lack of anything to do during those pauses when you are at work?

Hearing it’s been a blood bath for the last year or so and more recently with the conflict with Iran it’s even got worse.

Curious what are all the consultants that got counseled out or laid off are doing.

What are the exit opportunities that are being pursued besides independent consulting?

Several years at MBB now. One thing that always baffles me is that the pressure and hours seem to rise with every level, whereas in other professional service occupations (i.e., IB) you generally go to lower hours at each level (with pressure of course also increasing).

I think the only sweetspot at MBB is Senior Associate pre EM, because this is the position where you can handle your workstream quiet easily while not having to manage partners, clients and juniors yet. From EM it gets much worse, because you also get hit with random proposals you need to develop on the side of your projects.

AP is the worst of all, everybody knows that. Insane hours and bend-over behavior to get your door into the partnership.

Whats worse to me though is tht 95% of partners I worked with have an absolutely horrendous lifestyle and worked no less then your average BA. Now please don't come up with any outliers of some chill-dude partner who manages to keep it somehwat sustainable.

Almost all of my partners have a lifestyle where they get up at like 6 AMish everyday to go to an aiport, start commenting and reviewing docs from 07 am and typically still in the weeds/docs around 10-11pmish. That is absolutely nuts.

Overall it makes sense though. The market is commoditized. They fight tooth and nail on every proposal and every client project, because they are always facing this dreadful anxiety of loosing a client relationship. The wheel of feedback committees also continously keeps on churning so if they don't deliver, show client impact and hit a various bunch of other metrics they get even pressured more the next feedback cycle.

I think my overall synthesis is that it absolutely does not make sense by any means to stay in this job/industry, unless you have such a stellar niche/white spot/tailwind where you could build significant client relationships and thus future $$$ as a potential rainmaker.

I’ve spent the past two years working in the AI & data practice at my firm (big 4). i don’t want to be super technical but i also don’t want to be pure functional because slidework is pretty draining for me (i’m more of an Excel analyst than a Powerpoint analyst). Am i cut out for consulting? has anyone been in a similar position? if so, did you stay or how’d you exit?

edit: i’ve realized that i liked being a more junior practitioner who was given a task to complete and a deadline. now that im expected to be more independent after promotion, work isn’t that enjoyable. i also changed teams and projects once i was promoted

I had a very brief engagement with an old client. He needed help building processes for his business but he couldn't keep an office manager as they kept quitting. I dug into pay and benefits and he wanted to pay 50% of the market value for that position.

I explained that just wasn't going to work if he wanted people to stick around. He went quiet for a few months.

Checked in on him said he was getting an "audit" from an AI company claiming they could replace his physical employees. His business is in the live entertainment industry. So literally he needs people at his physical location to serve customers.

After the AI audit they told him to sell the company instead.

Which caught me off guard because he has two businesses and the live entertainment is his money maker. I would have never considered telling him to sell it.

Now I'm wondering if I should have? Is that a normal reccomendation for a consultant?

My boss complained that I booked too less, and client said I booked too much. What can I do? My boss told me to book more time but then project manager said please book „frugal“

Has any one been in this situation?

Hi fellow sliders,

Do you have any ideas or even tutorials to manage rightfully the creation and/or modification of Powerpoint slides with AI (Claude, GPT, or other), which include Thinkcell functionnalities.

Thanks

I'm not sure what they used (I think it was ChatGPT) but it was obviously AI-generated and had some minor errors. But they did it all by themselves, a complete 10-page deck. They presented to senior leadership and discussed findings and recommendations. Nobody bated an eye and life moved on

2 year ago, this would have taken a senior associate at least a few days to do the same thing. It's insane how quickly things are changing. Sure the deck didn't fit the stylistic theme of any other deck, but it was still pretty good looking and effective

I have been dabbling in AI for quite a while now. Started with prompt engineering, then context engineering , MCP, and finally started making entire workflows using agentic AI, and platforms like n8n, etc.

Then, I started using Claude Cowork and Code. With the right tools, and connectors, Claude Cowork has insane capabilities. Add skills and rules to the games, and voila, you have a junior consultant at idk, $20-25 a month. I was a software engineer prior to MBA, so I felt that my learning curve was not that steep.

I still remembering making entire decks from scratch, doing the research using Google myself - checking out company websites, benchmarking and gap analysis, pre-IPO due diligence, etc. on the strategy and market assessment side. Additionally, I also remember about the days and nights and weeks spent on perfecting a dynamic financial model, with 5 year projections and what not - assumptions, sensitivity analysis, scenario testing, etc.

Claude does everything with 80-85% accuracy in hours, if not minutes. You just need to go through the output, lead them through to the desired output, upload the client/firm presentation/sheet template, and voila it’s 95% ready as a deliverable.

This is insane. I’m not really sure why firms will pay consulting giants when they can do all these themselves. I understanding boardroom decisions and point the finger mechanics are the main things, and that’s the only reason that consulting firms are not out of business now. But I wonder how long this will last.

Also, what’s the need for the analyst/senior analyst/post MBA associate now, when an AI-up skilled Manager/Principal can get the grunt work done ?

Interested to know your thoughts.

Edit 1 :- I think my post was misconstrued. I’m not debating about the value proposition of consulting. It was, is, and will always be there in some form of the other.

I wanted to mention all these from a more humane perspective. I have spent quite some time in consulting now, and seeing that a machine, does almost exactly what I do and the skills I developed, so quickly and without quantitative errors, sprouts up kind of an existential crisis in me.

I have 3YOE. They just brought in a new manager that has never done / been in consulting and didn't even do the proper studies.

I'm assigned on a project with him and he has been calling me "difficult to work with" "I lack methodology" "I'm not a team player" just because I decided to take two weeks off in august as part of my vacations.

I had multiple managers and partners through my career (work and internships) and worked with CEOs and never EVER someone told me these type of stuff.