Why hire design consultants when AI exists?
The year is 2006. It’s a Friday afternoon. Your boss has just knocked on your office door to inform you that the customer experience overhaul you’ve been pushing for has finally been green lit. But instead of two years to complete it, you’ve been given six months. Even worse, you need to have a full timeline and budget ready to present to the Executive Leadership Team on Monday afternoon. With the current capacity of your team, this is an impossible task. But you’re going to have to find a way to get it done.
For decades, large companies have hired design consultants for exactly situations like these:
To add capacity without adding headcount
To supply capabilities the organization doesn’t have
To mobilize quickly around an urgent mandate
To bring a fresh perspective to a problem
But in just a few years, AI has changed all that.
You can now generate a CX strategy roadmap before the first meeting of the day or redesign an executive presentation before lunch. And unlike in 2006, you can have that timeline and budget ready for the ELT meeting on Monday without giving up your weekend. All finished in minutes without any external help—or external spend.
For an SVP under pressure to do more with less, reducing external spend can seem like a no brainer.
Why pay outsiders to augment the team when AI can provide seemingly unlimited capacity?
But capacity was never the highest-value part of a strong consulting relationship. The real value lies in the consultant’s ability to correctly frame the problem, design around human behavior, and build alignment among stakeholders. AI makes the artifacts cheaper. But it can’t make those organizational conditions disappear.
So, if AI isn’t going to fully replace the value of design consulting in your business, then where do you draw the line? How do you ensure you’re getting the best of both worlds—using AI to optimize your spend while maintaining the expert, critical lens a design consultant brings?
The first step is to change what you look for in a design consultant.
What to look for in a design consultant
If AI can replace grunt-level production work, a good design consultant has to provide more than a shiny new slide deck. They should expand your thinking in unexpected ways, bring you a team of experts who can guide the process with confidence, and provide solutions tailored to your unique context.
Here are the top three things to look for in a design consultant in the age of AI.
They deliver what you didn’t ask for
AI is built to give you what you ask for. You provide a series of inputs, craft a carefully considered prompt, and it will produce a fairly accurate and good-looking facsimile of an answer. Ask it for a point of view and it will confidently supply one; give it a specification and it will generate the requested output. But these answers often fall apart under scrutiny. Why?
Because they can only ever go as far as your own understanding of the problem.
AI may be able to confidently answer all your questions, but it’s limited by the questions you know how to ask. By the perspective you already hold.
As a result, the final deliverables often aren’t as useful as they claim to be. So, they never get used. The strategy roadmap never gets rolled out, the service blueprint sits on a shelf, the training program gets sidelined. Not because they don’t look good. More often, it’s because they’re either incomplete or they don’t address the underlying problem—because they started from a flawed premise.
A valuable design consultant gives you more than just a good answer to the question you asked. They test the premise. They listen for feedback from every level of the organization. They reveal conflicts between your stated goals and operational incentives. They combine the client’s institutional knowledge with patterns learned elsewhere, then co-design a direction that people can actually implement.
They only bring the A-team
In the old model of consulting, you might initially discuss your needs with an experienced, senior consultant. But once the work begins, the team often changes, with experienced practitioners giving way to a large team of junior analysts and other staffers who perform the interviews, sketch the designs, and manage the overall relationship.
This team structure brings a lot of human computing power. But it comes at a cost. The increased overhead of employing all those analysts gets passed on to you as the client.
But beyond the financial, there’s another cost as well: trust.
When the team you thought you were paying for isn’t the team you get, it can be hard to form an honest and collaborative relationship between your team and the consultant. And that relationship is often the key to an effective design process.
With AI, a few experienced practitioners can accelerate transcript synthesis, competitive scans, and scenario generation. They can prototype content, documentation, and production themselves without relying instead on a more junior team. In this new model, a good design consultant will give you the A-team every time, powered by AI, to work leaner, faster, and with a more personal touch.
They provide bespoke solutions
Over their many years in business, most experienced design consultants have developed thousands of frameworks, workshop formats, and other deliverables. Often, this means that before you even sit down with the consultant team to discuss the path forward, they already have a few options in mind. They’re just waiting for your problem to look close enough to something they’ve faced before so they can apply the proper template.
But a repository of plug-and-play solutions is no longer a differentiator. AI can now generate a generic journey map, transformation playbook, or governance framework in seconds. The repository is now available to everyone—even you.
The consultant’s true value lies in determining why the standard answer won’t work in your specific context.
Perhaps your business units have competing incentives. Perhaps the “customer” is really a network of buyers, users, regulators, and service employees. Perhaps employees reject the new process because the performance system rewards the old one. Most consulting firms won’t take the time to get to know your needs and design an individualized solution that fits your context. Neither will AI.
But a good design consultant starts with your unique situation and provides solutions designed just for you.
New expectations in the age of AI
It seems like every day we’re being introduced to a revolutionary new AI tool that can “replace your whole team” or “eliminate the need for outside help.” But like any other new technology, the real value lies in using it to expand your existing capacity to create better outcomes faster.
When it comes to working with a design consultant, AI can reduce the amount of time spent on routine production. But it should never replace the one-on-one, bespoke strategy solutions that only a human consultant can provide. A good design consultant will use new tools to increase the number of concepts a team can explore, the speed at which it can incorporate feedback, and the fidelity of what it can test before you commit further resources. That is a reason to expect more from a consultant—not simply to spend less.
For over 40 years, we’ve been working with teams like yours to develop tailored design solutions to some of the most challenging organizational problems. If you’re ready to move past automated answers and find a solution that works in the unique context of your organization, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.