How AI is eating up consulting.
If you sell thinking for a living, read this blog twice.
Table of contents
✦ Being a consultant in 2025.
✦ How AI is eating up searching.
✦ How AI is eating up designing slides.
✦ A video of me being a consultant.
archive: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pWuMCBVQo1zKcgKltX_BZxAr31KgxmOlp3Vzvmc5Hxc/edit?usp=sharing
1. Being a consultant in 2025.
Consulting used to trade hours for decks.
In 2025, AI wipes out the grunt work: search, slides, first drafts.
Any insight becomes a commodity in hours. AI puts the same facts in everyone’s hands, updates them nonstop, and clones angles on demand. What’s fresh at 9 a.m. is baseline by 5 p.m. So don’t sell “findings”; sell decisions. Your edge is context, judgment, and sequencing.
What to do first, second, third. Win on the “so what” and the “now what.”
Clients don’t buy keystrokes. They buy decision velocity and accountable outcomes.
Execution is cheap (and I will show you how). Framing and sequencing aren’t.
So how do you get a cheap & efficient execution with AI?
2. How AI is eating up search.
Before AI: Knowledge workers spent ~20% of the week just looking for information (≈ 8 hours in a 40-hour week). That’s McKinsey’s MGI study of interaction work.
An often-cited IDC baseline pegs it even higher: ~2.5 hours/day (~30% of the day) searching for information. (Yes, it’s older, but it’s the canonical pre-AI benchmark.)
So searching fast makes us 20-30% more productive in a day.
Big deal. But how?
Perplexity to search.
It’s my favorite AI to search for anything.
It’s the very top of my list of AI to pay for:
I always go for the Research mode of Perplexity.
Now this is my favorite template of prompt to search like a consultant:
Role: Research analyst. Show a brief plan, then execute with citations.
Goal: [ONE-LINE GOAL].
Scope: Geo=[GEOGRAPHY]; Time=[START–END] history; [FUTURE YEARS]=forecasts only (with citations). Units=[CURRENCY/UNITS]. Include=[IN]; Exclude=[OUT].
Metrics: [METRIC 1]; [METRIC 2]; [METRIC 3]; [ADD MORE].
Sources (priority): [STATS OFFICE/MINISTRY] > [REGULATOR/INDUSTRY BODY] > [INTL DB: OECD/World Bank/etc.] > [TOP ANALYSTS]. Prefer originals; avoid PR/blogs.
Method: Use date filters. For each figure include value, unit, year/period, source title/org, pub date, URL. If conflicts, show both, explain, and choose. Add ≤25-word quotes w/ page.
Outputs: 10-bullet summary; assumptions/definitions; gaps/risks + next steps.
Guardrails: Only citable info. Show publication date vs data period. Label forecasts. No invented numbers.
Here’s an example with “Biotech benchmark in Switzerland.”
The results are fantastic. It can even create some graphs for you:
Remember, this is the worst AI + search will ever be.
Perplexity is my number 1 choice to search, but if you can’t pay for it (and only pay for ChatGPT), here is the solid alternative:
ChatGPT to search.
It is still one of the leaders in searching for anything.
But you must set it up the right way.
1 - You must turn on “Thinking” when searching.
2 - Then type /search to activate search, always.
3 - Copy & paste this prompt for quick searches:
Act like [expert, for example “McKinsey consultant”].
Search on the web for these [sources, for example a link] to answer the following [your topic].
But if you want to go as deep as Perplexity, you must turn on “Deep Research”.
It’s the most powerful (it also takes the longest) search available. You can use the same prompt as I used on Perplexity. Then you simply have to answer ChatGPT’s questions.
And the results speak for themselves. Just check the length & depth of the report here.
Other things to search.
I use Consensus to search for academic papers. I even made a YouTube video a year ago about me writing an entire thesis for my ex. She actually got 90+/100 at a prestigious university. I guess AI is eating up studying, too.
Consensus is awesome because it’s specifically made for academic papers. You quickly get the academic “consensus” on any question.
To search through tweets, I use Grok. Reminder: everything happens first on X/Twitter. So Grok is super helpful for this (as it is the AI from X).
And then, there is the classic YouTube/Reddit combo (much better than Google).
But to search on Reddit, I use a GPT on ChatGPT. This email gets too long, so I’ll make an entire newsletter on how to search on Reddit using ChatGPT.
And to extract YouTube summaries, I use Perplexity.
So we go back to: Perplexity & ChatGPT is all you need.
3. How AI is eating up designing slides.
I invited
, the CEO of Gamma (50 million users) to write this section with me. It has been recently listed as one of the potential future $1 billion company in the next coming years.This is simply the best AI to generates slides, decks, PowerPoint...
The fastest way to use it for me is:
1 - I go to Gamma GPT to quickly. It will generate the outline.
2 - I copy the outline, and paste it inside “Generate” on Gamma.
3 - I make the final adjustments.
4 - It generates a near-perfect presentation, shareable with a link. I can edit every single part of it, ask AI to edit it, change any image, generate it with any AI model… Gamma is basically what Powerpoint was supposed to be in 2025.
What I love the most:
Generating + editing any image with AI.
The new feature “Smart diagrams” to create diagrams.
Edit the entire presentation with AI (top right ✨ emoji).
4. A video of me being a consultant
Here’s how I use AI to do the work of a consultant: