where to find real strategic insight in the age of AI
Transformation revenue and AI automation is thinning out the strategy capabilities of the 'strategy consulting' firms. Clients are turning to intelligence platforms and reputique boutiques.
For most of the past three decades, “strategy consulting” meant a very specific thing. A senior partner arrived with judgment based on a team of associates running the machinery, and clients received a distilled view of markets, competitors, customer needs, and the options that followed.
Inside the major firms, the economics have shifted. Strategy engagements are loss leaders for multi-year transformation work while AI increasing delivers the bottom half of the work pyramid. The most commercially important client projects are no longer strategic decisions but systems integration, AI rollout, procurement redesign, and cross-functional PMOs. The ‘strategy consulting’ brands remain powerful, but the strategy output — the very thing that helps clients see around corners — is thinning out.
The result is a widening gap: MBB and their next-tier spinoffs have record revenue, yet true strategy capacity inside those firms has never been thinner.
For a Head of Strategy whether at corporate, business unit or product level, that gap matters for one reason: strategy problems have not become simpler. Intensified international competition. A chaotic market environment shaped by fast-changing executive-branch policy. Shortened product cycles. Fast-moving rivals. Boards that still demand clarity. The stakes have risen while the supply of real strategic thinking from the mainstay strategy firms is shrinking.
This shrinkage has created a vacuum. Executives still need competitive direction, market power mapping, and visibility into rival intent across geographies. Boards still ask the same questions. Product, strategy, and intelligence leaders still need to brief senior stakeholders with authority. But the traditional sources that once supplied this thinking are now optimized for tech transformation, not for insight.
Some clients — often MBB alumni — are pulling more strategy work in-house. But this comes with real constraints: limited bandwidth, uneven access to external primary sources, lack of time for sustained market-facing intelligence work, and internal political pressures that color analysis more than anyone would like to admit.
The answer is not a new strategy-focused behemoth. It is a return to expert-led, intelligence-driven strategy delivered in two forms.
Subscription-based business intelligence: consistent, high-frequency strategic insight produced for the many rather than 1:1. Executives use these sources to pressure-test assumptions, triangulate competitive intent, and surface issues long before they reach the boardroom.
Reputiques: boutiques that trade on the personal reputation of key leaders, deploy small, focused teams, and use AI to drive deep, original research and bespoke analysis — producing strategy that is actually strategic.
Together, the use of these two channels — intelligence platforms for breadth and reputiques for depth — are reconstructing the clarity that clients used to seek from mainstay ‘strategy consulting’ firms.
For many clients, this blended model is becoming their new default: institutional intelligence that keeps the organization informed, and specialist support when a high-stakes decision demands sharp, focused strategy work.
The Obelisk Shift Eliminated the People Who Once Generated Real Insight
The collapse in strategy capacity inside the major firms came from economics. As the pyramid turns into what HBR called an obelisk, the layer that historically produced new insight — analysts and associates doing original research and problem-solving — is hollowing out. In my earlier work on obelisks and reputiques, I showed how the structural evolution of consulting firms made this outcome predictable.
This is consistent with Roger Martin’s observation that the economic model of modern consulting no longer supports the development of real strategists.
The data is unambiguous. Junior hiring has contracted sharply. McKinsey executed a rare firm-wide restructuring with roughly 5,000 job cuts and began more aggressively “counseling out” junior consultants. New MBA and undergraduate hires at BCG and McKinsey experienced start-date delays of up to a year, the strongest signal that the base of the pyramid is no longer required at historical volume. Big Four firms, a useful proxy for scaled delivery models, cut graduate intake between 11 and 29 percent — explicitly citing AI and offshoring.
Inside the firms, the shift is even clearer when you examine what junior talent actually does today. At McKinsey, ‘Lilli’ now manages research across “100 years of internal IP” and reduces synthesis time by roughly 30 percent. At BCG, ‘Deckster’ generates PowerPoint decks, and grades its own slides against internal rubrics. Deloitte and PwC have rolled out agentic AI systems that automate first-year work.
These tools do not “augment” junior consultants. They replace large portions of the work that built the craft of strategy.
The old craft required the bottom half of the pyramid to spend hundreds of hours in messy, unstructured terrain, forcing pattern recognition, building judgment, and generating the raw insight senior partners distilled for clients. That system created leverage: juniors discovered signals; partners interpreted them.
In the obelisk, leverage reverses. Senior partners manage more accounts with fewer people beneath them. AI completes the mechanical work, and associates are redeployed into transformation programs, PMOs, and implementation streams. The pipeline that once trained strategists is now optimized for execution management, not discovery.
AI Encodes Historical Thinking and Produces Homogenized Strategy Across Firms
The consequences are now visible in the work product. Strategy leaders across industries tell us they are receiving deliverables that are polished but thin.
AI-driven “best practices” assembled from internal templates rather than original research. McKinsey partners have privately acknowledged that Lilli “pulls from what we already know,” narrowing the insight frontier. BCG’s “Review This” button grades slide decks against aesthetic and content rubrics. Consultants back-solve recommendations to score well on internal quality metrics rather than investigate the market.
Identical “AI strategy roadmaps” delivered to direct competitors, often down to sequencing and initiative names. One client told us: “Our competitor’s plan was basically ours with a different cover.”
Market sizing errors as generative tools reused outdated internal analyses. In at least two PE deals in 2024, commercial diligence materials had to be reissued because junior consultants used LLM-generated sizing derived from internal decks that were three to seven years old.
Target operating models transplanted across industries with only superficial adjustments. A US insurance carrier received a model nearly identical to what a European competitor received six months earlier. A global logistics company was advised to adopt a procurement model built for a CPG firm because both were categorized by AI as “asset-heavy industries needing vendor consolidation.”
Commercial diligences that converge around the same five to seven themes, regardless of sector or geography. PE firms report that commercial diligence decks from different firms look nearly identical in structure.
This isn’t for lack of competence but because of the structural economic incentives. When original discovery collapses, reuse becomes the default. When only senior partners have the time or mandate to think, breadth narrows. When incentives reward delivery, not insight, strategy is just a template.
Inside enterprises, the effect is simple: executives receive strategy work that feels interchangeable — competitive “best practices,” recycled frameworks, and recommendations that mirror what rivals already have on their desks.
The shift from pyramid to obelisk isn’t just changing the shape of firms. It’s eliminating the developmental engine that once made MBB etc., valuable strategists.
The Insight Gap, and the Strategy Partner Built for 2026 and Beyond
The insight gap inside MBB and their mid-sized cousins is real, and clients feel it first. When the developmental engine at the base of the pyramid disappears, five things vanish with it: 1) fresh analysis, 2) real competitive intelligence, 3) first-party discovery, 4) contrarian reframing, and 5) context-specific hypotheses. These are the ingredients of real strategy, and they no longer come bundled with the big-firm model.
This is the structure that large-firm economics reward: scalable delivery and standardized, AI-enabled playbooks. Original strategic insight — messy, labor-intensive, and primary-research-heavy — is not central to that model.
Strategy work, however, still demands it.
Across industries, the most effective buyers of original insight and strategy are fast-replacing the old “one-firm-for-everything” model with a new barbell:
Subscription-based business intelligence for breadth and situational awareness.
Senior-led reputiques for depth, originality, and high-stakes decisions.
The firms who can fill the insight gap look very different from the firms that dominated the last generation of strategy consulting.
These firms are boutique in structure: small enough that senior leaders stay hands-on, but equipped to run global discovery, multi-market competitive profiling, and high-context primary research without the large fixed-cost machinery of a pyramid.
They specialize in your strategic terrain, the markets and competitor set that actually determine your advantage.
They maintain a primary-research backbone, with insight pulled directly from customers, competitors, distributors, suppliers, former operators, and regulators — not just recycled from legacy decks.
They avoid pattern-matching you into the mean; original hypotheses are a feature, not an accident.
They sustain deep competitive and market intelligence capability — the kind internal teams struggle to maintain and large firms deprioritize entirely because large-scale revenue and profits are elsewhere.
And most importantly, they generate new strategic options: reframing questions, mapping competitor intent, identifying sources of power, and articulating non-consensus moves grounded in real-world signals.
This is where business-intelligence platforms and reputique strategy firms are filling the space vacated by players still known as “strategy consulting firms” for legacy shorthand. Many original insight and strategy consulting buyers are already moving in this direction: broad intelligence to keep the enterprise oriented, specialized partners for the decisions that swing outcomes.
The principle is straightforward: select the system that gives you clarity before your competitors have it.
Adil Husain is the founder of Emerging Strategy, a reputique strategy firm focused on competitive strategy, and The Intelligence Council, a subscription-based business intelligence and media platform serving executives in complex, fast-moving industries.
If you want to connect, collaborate, or argue, you can reach him at ahusain@emerging-strategy.com