How AI quietly became part of my consulting practice — not as a shortcut, but as a system of thought.
Most mornings, my day begins long before the city wakes. Around four a.m., the world is quiet enough to think clearly. I make coffee, open my notes, and build structure around whatever challenge sits ahead. By six, I walk across to the Starbucks as it opens, take a corner seat, and work until the sun is fully up. Those three hours often decide how the rest of the day will go.
That rhythm has always been part of how I survive the kind of work I do. Strategy consulting sounds glamorous, but what it really demands is mental endurance. You’re asked to see patterns across systems that were never designed to fit together: governments trying to modernize, agencies balancing policy and politics, organizations chasing transformation faster than their people can adapt. It’s not just about frameworks. It’s about holding complexity long enough to make it clear for someone else.
For years, I did it alone. I liked the solitude. I still do. My desk at home is a quiet place, and when I return from meetings, it’s where the real work begins. There’s something calming about rebuilding the day into logic, into sense. But it was always heavy work — the kind that stretches your focus and leaves you feeling like your head is full of open tabs that never close.
I first tried AI tools in 2023, mostly out of curiosity. They were helpful for small things: tidying notes, organizing references, writing a line or two when my mind was tired. By mid-2024, I used them regularly for routine tasks, though I didn’t think much about it. Then, slowly, something shifted. I realized I was not just using AI — I was working with it. It began to hold parts of my process, the same way a good analyst or junior consultant might. It remembered my tone, my logic, my way of framing problems. It helped me maintain continuity across projects, especially when my days were fractured between calls, drafts, and presentations.
That’s when everything changed.
I no longer saw AI as a tool but as part of a system. It became the structure that holds the work when I’m not there — the scaffolding that keeps the logic intact while I move between ideas. Each project now connects to the next, not through memory, but through design. My research, drafts, and models no longer live in separate places. They talk to each other. The system reminds me why a decision made sense months ago and keeps me honest when my reasoning starts to drift.
What improved was not speed, but quality. My thinking stayed sharper because it no longer leaked through cracks of distraction. I could move from one institution to another — from a city government’s digital strategy to a national agency’s reform plan — and still feel centered in how I think. It was as if the work had started to think back, to help me see patterns I might have missed.
Sometimes I read articles about the “death of big consulting” and smile. Maybe the truth is simpler. The craft is changing. Intelligence no longer scales by team size. It scales by system design. One person, working with the right architecture, can now operate with the clarity and precision of many.
AI didn’t replace what I do. It restored the space to do it well. It gave me back the quiet part of consulting — the thinking, the connecting, the building of sense.
These days, I still start at four, coffee in hand, before the world stirs. The difference is that I’m no longer alone in the work. Somewhere inside that system I’ve built, the thinking continues — waiting for me to join it again.