After ChatGPT came to market in 2022, the marketing team at Reckitt Benckiser, which makes Lysol and Mucinex, was convinced that the new AI technology could help its business. But the team wasn’t sure how to do it, so they turned to Boston Consulting Group for help.
Reckitt’s request was one of hundreds Boston Consulting Group received last year. He now makes a fifth of his income (from zero just two years ago) through AI-related jobs.
“There’s a genuine thirst to find out what the implications are for their businesses,” said Vladimir Lukic, chief technology officer at Boston Consulting Group.
The next big tech boom is a long-awaited gift for inexperienced consultants. From Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company to IBM and Accenture, sales are growing and hiring is on the rise because companies desperately need tech sherpas who can help them figure out what generative AI means and how it can help their businesses.
As the tech industry looks for ways to make money with generative AI, consultants have begun to cash in.
IBM, which has 160,000 consultants, has secured more than $1 billion in sales commitments related to generative AI for consulting work and its watsonx system, which can be used to build and maintain AI models. Accenture, which offers consulting and technology services, posted sales of $300 million last year. About 40 percent of McKinsey’s business this year will be related to generative AI, and KPMG International, which has a global advisory division, went from making no money a year ago on work related to generative AI to targeting more than $650 million in linked business opportunities. to technology over the past six months.
The demand for technology-related advice is reminiscent of the dotcom boom in the sector. In the 1990s, companies flocked to consultants with requests for advice. Between 1992 and 2000, sales of Sapient, a digital consulting company, rose from $950,000 to $503 million. Later technological changes, such as the migration to mobile telephony and cloud computing, were less rushed, said Nigel Vaz, chief executive of the company, which is now known as Publicis Sapient.
“In the mid-’90s, CEOs were saying, ‘I don’t know what a website is or what it could do for my business, but I need one,’” Vaz said. “This is similar. Companies say, ‘Don’t tell me what to build. Tell me what you can build.’”
Consulting firms have been struggling to prove what they can do. In May, Boston Consulting Group hosted a one-day conference at a Boston convention center where it set up demonstration booths for OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI technology leaders. He also demonstrated some of his own AI work in robotics and programming.
Generative AI sales are helping the industry find growth after a post-pandemic lull. The management consulting industry in the United States is expected to bring in $392.2 billion in sales this year, up 2 percent from a year ago, according to IBISWorld, a research firm.
The work for which consultants have been hired varies from company to company. Some consulting firms are advising companies on regulatory compliance as regions such as the European Union pass laws regulating artificial intelligence. Others are drawing up plans for AI customer service systems or developing guardrails to prevent AI systems from making mistakes.
For businesses, the results have been mixed. Generative AI is prone to giving people incorrect, irrelevant or meaningless information, known as hallucinations. It is difficult to ensure that you provide accurate information. You may also be slower to respond than a person, which can confuse customers about whether their questions will be answered.
IBM, which has a $20 billion consulting business, ran into some of those problems in its work with McDonald’s. Companies developed an AI-powered voice system to receive drive-thru orders. But after customers reported that the system made errors, such as adding nine iced teas to an order instead of the one requested by Diet Coke, McDonald’s ended the project.
McDonald’s said it remained committed to a future of digital ordering and would evaluate alternative systems. IBM said it was working with McDonald’s on other projects and was in talks with other restaurant chains about using its voice-activated AI.
Other IBM programs have shown more promise. The company worked with Dun & Bradstreet, an enterprise data provider, to develop a generative AI system to analyze and advise on supplier selection. The tool, called Ask Procurement, will allow employees to perform detailed searches with specific parameters. For example, you could find minority-owned memory chip suppliers and automatically create a request for proposals for them.
Gary Kotovets, director of data and analytics at Dun & Bradstreet, said his team of 30 people needed help from IBM to build the system. To assure clients that the answers Ask Procurement provides are accurate, he insisted that clients be able to trace each answer back to an original source.
“Hallucinations are a real concern and, in some cases, a perceived concern,” Kotovets said. “You have to overcome both and convince the client that it is not a hallucination.”
For seven weeks this year, McKinsey’s AI group QuantumBlack created a customer service chatbot for ING Bank, with guardrails to prevent it from offering mortgage or investment advice.
Because the chatbot’s viability was uncertain and McKinsey had limited experience with the relatively new technology, the company did the work as a “joint experiment” under its contract with ING, said Bahadir Yilmaz, chief analytics officer at ING. The bank paid McKinsey for the work, but Yilmaz said many consultants were willing to do speculative work with generative AI for no pay because they wanted to demonstrate what they could do with the new technology.
The project has been labor-intensive. When ING’s chatbot provided incorrect information during its development, McKinsey and ING had to identify the cause. They traced the problem to issues like outdated websites, said Rodney Zemmel, a senior partner at McKinsey who works in technology.
The chatbot now handles 200 of 5,000 customer queries a day. ING has humans review each conversation to ensure the system does not use discriminatory or harmful language or cause misunderstandings.
“The difference between ChatGPT and our chatbot is that our chatbot can’t be wrong,” Yilmaz said. “We have to be confident with the system we’re building, but we’re close.”
Over a four-month period this year, Reckitt worked with Boston Consulting Group to develop an artificial intelligence platform that could create local ads in different languages and formats. With the push of a button, the system can convert a commercial for Finish dishwasher detergent from English to Spanish.
Reckitt’s AI marketing system, which is being tested, can make local ad development 30 percent faster, saving the company time and avoiding tedious work, said Becky Verano, vice president of creative and Reckitt’s global capabilities.
Because the technology is so new, Verano said, the team is learning and adjusting its work as tech startups release updates to the image and language models. She credited Boston Consulting Group with bringing structure to that chaos.
“You have to constantly move to the latest trends, the most recent findings and learn each time how the tools respond,” he said. “There is no exact science to this.”
