- David A. Fields
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, David A. Fields
Will Bachman 00:02
Will Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and you can find the show notes in the full transcript of this episode at umbrexdotcom/unleashed where you can also sign up for the newsletter. For the show, I send a weekly email with news about the show and also some occasional bonus material. Now today, I am thrilled to have back my good friend David, a fields who’s been on the show 10 plus times we stopped counting. He’s my guest on episode number one, and always a favorite. David, welcome to the
David A. Fields 00:36
show. Will Bachman, it is always a pleasure to see you and to chat with you and to be here.
Will Bachman 00:43
So, David, today, you know, normally, we’re doing kind of evergreen content on on this show. But today, I wanted to get in with you on something a little bit more time based, which is, love to get your kind of current view of how AI is, you know, affecting firms. I know that you serve something 30 to 40 to 50 boutique consulting firms, and so you have this unique view into how consulting firms are, you know, changing their hiring practices, what tools they’re adopting, how they’re thinking about it. So give us a perspective. What are you seeing on how boutique consulting firms are using AI tools and and maybe start with how it’s affecting their hiring of junior
David A. Fields 01:29
folks? Okay, yeah, we can do that. And just to clarify so at any given time, our active client base is what you said, 3040, 50. We’re talking to multiples of that number of firms just in these sort of conversations. Yeah, it is timely, and we’re being asked more and more to help firms with an AI strategy
Will Bachman 01:51
characterize your so you’re you do you do serve some independent consultants. And I know you know probably at least two dozen of people that have worked with you over time, but you’re sort of give us the range of size of boutique firms that you’re seeing
David A. Fields 02:05
so our clients, you’re right. So about, I would say, right now it’s about 20% of our businesses is solo consultants, and 80% is firms that might range anywhere from 2 million to, you know, call it 100 million. There’s some, you know, clients a little larger, but, and we’re, I’m heading over to to Europe next week, with a 300 personal firm, you know. So, okay, it
Will Bachman 02:33
varies what’s like and what’s your what’s there, like, a rough thumb rule. So if I want to convert those revenue numbers to people like, what’s the average revenue per per head,
David A. Fields 02:44
the average revenue per FTE in consulting for the past decade? It’s amazing how little has changed. Is invented about 250 grand so if you have 100 person firm that traditionally is about a 25 $30 million dollar firm most often. Now that’s changing really rapidly because of the topic you brought up, all right, and most firms are looking for, how do we create the that revenue we’ve created with fewer people? How do we boost our revenue and not increase labor? That is the big promise of AI, of llms, and whether it completely pays off is yet to be seen. Well, what’s, you know, fascinating, of course, wills, because we’re at the the advent of this. It is the adoption rates are all over the map. We have clients who are still, you know, chat, PTL, with chat, what you know, what are you talking about, right? And, and then there are folks who are fully both feet in the water. Have seen 60% productivity gains. And, you know, are fully there. So it’s a really wide range of adoption right now, the you asked about hiring and hiring junior people, are we seeing an impact on hiring junior people? The answer is 100% Absolutely, and, and it’s a really common topic among firm leaders, right as I’m talking to other firm owners. This is it’s a big deal, and there’s this mixture of of concern and enthusiasm. We don’t need the junior analyst anymore. We’re getting better, faster, work for a fraction of the cost by using a well trained AI. What we do need is some people giving oversight to the AI to whatever we’ve built. We do need great templates to feed it, but we don’t need those junior analysts. But then there’s concern, because all right now, how do you get into the business? You. Right? And that’s, you know, I think that’s the question is still to be resolved.
Will Bachman 05:05
Where do you get your mid level engagement managers, right, right?
David A. Fields 05:10
And what’s a young graduate who’s interested in consulting? What do they do? Right? And, you know, it’s sort of like the common, I’m sure you’ve heard this, right? The common analogy is, is accounting firms, when calculators came into the, you know, into being, you’re like, Whoa, whoa, what? Well, what all these people used to do, all this, you know, basic addition and subtraction, and what will they do now the calculator has taken over their job. The entry level work changed. Yeah, right now it’s hard to see what it’s going to look like.
Will Bachman 05:45
It’s an influx. Let’s So, let’s talk some specifics. So, you know, obviously keeping details sanitized as required. Talk through some of these. You know, high adopter type firms like 60% product improvement. What sorts of tools are they using? What you know, what’s, how have they incorporated that in their process? How are they using those in to replace some what they might have hired a junior person to do in the past? Give us some specific like project.
David A. Fields 06:14
Okay, so I’ll talk about one of our clients helping in Canada that was specifically brought, has brought this 60% number to bear, and they have taken, at this point, a fairly hard line on not hiring anyone if there’s a way to replace that function that the functionality that output with an AI. And as a result, as you can imagine, if you start from that premise, you’re like, Okay, how do we solve this problem? Then what are they doing? All their analysis, all their the basic analysis is being run now through AI and then just template it. It’s just put in a into a a pre made process, if you will. They can feed in their notes. It spits out all their presentation drafts are done by AI, all their proposals, the the summaries of their context discussions. It’s all drafted by AI now. So you don’t have to hire new BD people. They’re not having to to hire people as they bring in more clients and they want a bunch more clients. They’re not having to bring in more people to do analysis, to draw up the this is where they’ve created all this product, what they see is productivity gains, and they’ve been able to speed up their turnaround so we can give client results faster without having to put more bodies against it that that’s been their experience. Are you more specific, or what tools are using, or
Will Bachman 08:01
any specific like, listen, like presentations that I have not done, an exhaustive review the kind of tools that I’ve seen. I’ve seen some tools that like, oh, just give us a prompt and we’ll create an entire pitch deck for your startup. I mean, those things are like, terrible, but I haven’t seen a good tool that is a okay. Create a one page. I just need a column chart with a, you know, with a call out on the right hand side. And, you know, here’s the data for it. Create like this, you know, column chart, or here. Create like a, a BFA and a call out. And, you know, lesson learned,
David A. Fields 08:43
what right so the tools for their work, it is obviously, the more templateable Your work is, yeah, the better this applies. And for them, a lot of their work, they try, I want to not give away data. They work with a lot of call in practices, right? So their clients are a lot of individual kind of practices, and each practice is, you know, they’re going to do their analysis and their assessment and give a recommendation in a fairly similar format, matter of fact, not a fairly similar format, a completely similar format. I mean, heck, we did this when I first grew up in consulting. There was a little bit of cut and paste that, you know, that you’re like, All right, here, here’s our standard deck. We’re going to have one of these, and we’re going to show one of those. We’re going to we’re going to going to we’re going to do this analysis. All you do is you plug in the data now, yes, then you have to think about it. What does it mean? What are the insights? But the basic presentation, if you have that built yourself, it will populate it, if you have the templates, and that’s what they’ve done, is. They’ve created the templates. And that was the hard work. The software that claims, you know, you just will give you a deck from everything they’re claiming to have. Those pieces of software are saying they have the templates themselves. Yeah, I find that to be pretty mediocre. But it’s like,
Will Bachman 10:16
what tool are they using to actually create PowerPoint slides say, hey, you know, here’s my template. Are they using chat, GPT for that, or is there some special purpose? I’d have to go
David A. Fields 10:25
back and be honest. I have to go back to my notes to look, I don’t think they’re using a special purpose. I think they’re either using Claude or or it could be open AI. I think almost any of these, co pilot, I don’t know about, you know, Gemini Claude, open, AI deep seek, they’re all pretty well trained now. But again, it’s garbage in, garbage out, yeah. And I think what separates people who are getting 60% productivity from folks who are like, I don’t know, Kim’s a waste is, you know, to use this, this one Canadian client, as an example. They’ve been willing to invest to make sure it’s not garbage in right? You say, here’s the same as when you bring in a human and you’re like, Well, how do we get teams? How do I delegate and get teams or subcontractors to produce good output? Well, the way is, by giving them really good direction on what that output should look like. It’s the same thing for for an AI,
Will Bachman 11:29
do you see these firms, particularly the ones that are, you know, kind of seeing the biggest productivity gains? Yeah. Are they developing these kind of AI templates and processes in house. Or are you seeing people engage a professional to come in and like, who really knows how to, you know, create a template, templated process. Are you seeing like that both?
David A. Fields 11:59
Okay, so we have a full time AI person now, and the you know now, partly that gives us the ability to help folks who need you know. How do we build this out? Right? But the one example, they built it all in house, with direction, right? With with, with some direction from us and help, but they’ve built it. They haven’t brought in outside experts. Instead, they’ve said that we’re going to make this our job. What used to be the job of create these templates and train individuals is now the job of create the template and train the the AI, it’s not super complex.
Will Bachman 12:40
Well beyond the standard sort of major general purpose llms Like Chachi PT and Claude, yeah, any specific purpose built tools come to mind, like I’ve had on the show, the founder of well, kalo Sid Masson, who’s on episode 615 which which started this due diligence tool, which is pretty incredible. We had San Chandor Martin talking about a tool that he built. He’s a former he’s a consultant, and built it for his own use as Kronos insights on episode 616 and we had the founder of my junior.ai, which is for expert interviews, where it you kind of have it plug in it, and then it will create sort of synthesis across all the expert interviews. Creates pages. Are you seeing people use actual purpose tools?
David A. Fields 13:36
Yes. And it is so varied. Are we talking to a CEO, to this morning of a consulting firm, and he was talking about how they’re using granola.ai, and it’s been great for them. I’m like, okay, great, you know? So, yeah, every day I’m writing down all of these new tools. It’s hard to keep track of them. What our AI guys basically said is the same thing, and that’s part of his job is keep you know, what are the new tools and what? What should we be looking at? Because it’s so varied. I mean, he said, You can’t keep track of all of them, and our rule is you never buy fully into any of them. Meaning, he said, no such even if they give you a three extra months to do an annual subscription. Always go monthly, because it’s changing too rapidly. And you’re not going to want it in a year. You’re going to want some, some other tool, or we need to be able to be flexibly migrate. But you have a lot of folks in the umbrex community that are building AIS, people you you just mentioned senesia. I can’t slipjavik, maybe pronounce it. He’s building a whole firm around new AI. So there are a lot of special purpose AIS and clients are using them. I’d have a hard time telling you them.
Will Bachman 14:57
Have you seen in. Kind of variation by sort of functional area. Like, do you see certain types of functional folks using AI, much more than other types? Like, do you think about strategy or ops folks or org or marketing or sales or finance focus consultants,
David A. Fields 15:22
the that’s such an interesting question, Will I would have characterized the split on adoption less around function or type of firm, and more just around kind of founder mindset and operational orientation. And it there are, there are people who are very oriented on, how do I create efficiency, how do I adopt tools and all of that. And that has seemed to be more of the driver. I mean, we have, there’s a supply chain consultancy that is, again, both feet in, more than both feet in, wants to be on the bleeding edge of AI, but, but, but we have a supply chain consultancy that’s like, Yeah, whatever. Sure. We want the the tools. But there’s no one that’s on the in that field, for instance, that’s going to say, oh, no, no, I want to stay away from it, because you need the analytical horsepower to stay relevant. And so I think it has less to do with that and the in the function, and more to do with the attitude or personality and perhaps the industry they’re serving. The some some consultancies that are serving very slow industries, you know, feel less pressure to adopt AI.
Will Bachman 16:52
I guess I’m seeing just that there’s a lot of tools for anything that is about doing like desk research or traditional research, if a consultant associate used to do, you know, second year. So a lot of like due diligence, market assessment type work, a lot of that, particularly the more junior prep work, can be done with some tools now extremely efficiently, and you can spend your time drawing insights instead
David A. Fields 17:25
basic and now basic analysis. 100% everybody. That’s where they’re they’re using it. Yeah, research, interesting. So I was just before you, I was on the phone with one of our clients in Europe, that is in the research business. They had their best month ever. Wow, right? You’re like, Well, why is that? They’re actually fairly protected? I think because, even though synthetic voc is an interesting idea, it’s not good. And I think clients are starting to realize this, that llms will give you an answer, but it’s not necessarily a valid answer, and you truly want to know what your customers are thinking. You have to have somebody talk with them. And AIs are not great at that yet, so they will make up an answer, but it’s not a valid answer,
Will Bachman 18:14
yeah. And by synthetic voc, just to my understanding of what you’re referring to, there is where the AI will kind of generate a bunch of, you know, potential profiles of here are, you know, 100 different consumers, each with its own characteristics, and then it will interview that sort of slight character. There’s also out there on episode 598, I talked to harsh Sahai, yeah. So this is starting to happen, where he runs Bridgetown research, where they’ve built an AI tool that will actually do the expert interview. So it’s kind of this, instead of the person filling out a paper survey or an internet survey, they’re actually in voice mode with an AI that’s doing responsive questions. So it’s not just kind of going down a script, but if the person says something interesting, the AI will say, oh, say, more about that. Where’d you? Where’d you? Where’d you get that detail?
David A. Fields 19:08
Yeah, and we’re not seeing so I think that’s awesome. We’re not seeing wide adoption of that yet, though, again, two years from now, we’re going to look back at today and go, Oh my God. What were we thinking we totally missed this, right? That the one thing I can guarantee, yeah, is is going to look really different.
Will Bachman 19:26
Yeah, this is definitely not an evergreen episode. It’s
David A. Fields 19:31
an episode to look back at and laugh. You know, look back on and laugh
Will Bachman 19:35
about any, any just put you on the spot. Any predictions for for this fall in 2026 of what what you expect to see
David A. Fields 19:47
we have just been talking about, it’s so unpredictable. I think it’s going to be very spiky. What you’re going to see is folks who are generalists recommendation givers, are going to struggle and. Incredibly over the next few months, specialists who have some real insight and can give practical application. You know, hopefully it’s we’re seeing it Continue to rebound. You see a lot of projects come in. Will is that consistent or inconsistent with what you’re saying?
Will Bachman 20:19
I’d say it is often the case that clients want someone who has done that project before, right in their industry, right? And you know, we can say, well, you know, if you want, we can filter on your industry and this kind of project, and that narrows the pool, and you can have the best person at this narrow little pool, or you could get, like, a really top performer who hasn’t done this specific project before, and they might be like higher capability level, and they can quickly pick up the speed, because you you company, are the expert on your industry, right? You can tell them, and they say, No, no, no, we want
David A. Fields 21:06
some that’s a hard. That’s a hard. That was my whole entire first book, my whole, you know, the you know, executives guide to consultants, was all trying to convince clients to look for outcome expertise, not situation expertise, because they are the experts in their own situations, the clients, right? And that, that was, you know, banging head against a wall. No, that’s not. Clients won’t
Will Bachman 21:28
do that, right? So helpful will? This is great. So, so tough news for it sounds like for junior people that, I mean, what advice would you give to a junior consultant, like someone who wants to be that junior consultant. How should that person try to worm their way into the consulting world?
David A. Fields 21:49
Well, I wish I knew the answer to that. I think I’m totally speculating. Will I think that it’s not enough to just be smart now you have to have some domain expertise that you can bring to bear. Yes, be good and insightful and problem solver and all of that, but that that used to be, what would get you into a firm? I’m not sure that can get you into a firm now. What can get you in is knowledge that the gpts don’t have or some insight how you gather that if you haven’t spent any time in industry? Boy, that’s a good question.
Will Bachman 22:28
Interesting. I almost might, I almost might, would have flipped that, which would say, like, be top 1% top 5% at using the AI tools,
David A. Fields 22:39
like, oh yeah, great. Also, I think that’s, I would consider that in the same realm of of but that’s not just generalist thinking. It’s not just smart that’s expertise around how to use the tools.
Will Bachman 22:55
I mean, you’re saying, you know, firms vary in their adoption of AI, if a college graduate goes to a consulting firm that’s a low adopter and says, Look, I’m I want to get into consulting. I want to work for you guys, and I am so far ahead I’ve been using, I’ve explored every single way to use chat, GPT, to do stuff, and I can, you know, analyze data with it. I can create pages, I can do research. I can generate insights. I know how to do prompts. Person might hire themselves into a job. Yeah, they
David A. Fields 23:27
might. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the case, or whether the head of the firm is going to go, oh, yeah, cool. You’ll be part of my IT group well, but you know, I guess we’ll find out. So I would love all the the people who are entering the industry right now or who are at the beginning of their career, it would be great if they reached out to you and reach out to me, yeah, and talk to us, yeah,
Will Bachman 23:49
and to reach out to you. David, how should they do that? Share your contact info. How should people do that?
David A. Fields 23:54
David, at David A fieldsdotcom that’s you know, anyone can email anytime or go to the site. David afieldsdotcom
Will Bachman 24:00
David, and I recommend to everyone to sign up for David’s weekly newsletter. I love his blog posts, if tremendous insight, and sometimes some good stick stick drawings. So definitely visit David A fieldsdotcom and sign up for his newsletter. And you can, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. That’s where I where I hang out. David, thank you so much for joining today.
David A. Fields 24:26
Will Bachman, it is always a delight. We have fun. We.
