Most leaders are talking about AI wrong. The real challenge isn’t discussing artificial intelligence in theoretical terms; it’s building a practical AI consulting strategy that delivers measurable results without sacrificing human expertise. Right now, companies are falling into two camps: those using AI to do broken things faster, and those using it to build a real competitive edge. Navigating this divide requires more than new technology. It demands a new way of running your business.
Drawing from an intensive 18-month journey implementing artificial intelligence at SalesGlobe, Chief Operating Officer and Partner Michelle Seger shares a highly pragmatic blueprint for success. In a recent conversation with Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Fullcast, Seger revealed her framework for transforming consulting operations, elevating client value, and preparing for the future of work.
Ultimately, a successful AI implementation is not about replacing your consultants. It is about “decontaminating” their roles. By systematically removing mundane tasks, firms can free their top talent for the deep, strategic thinking and complex problem solving that clients value most.
Why Your Firm Needs an AI Consulting Strategy Today
The baseline for what clients expect from consultants has been permanently raised by AI. Adopting AI in consulting is about more than just efficiency. It’s about changing what you deliver to clients and how your consultants create that value.
Anticipating the Inevitable Shift in Client Expectations
Michelle Seger recognized early that the ground rules of consulting were changing. “If you think about what you can do today with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and all of them, you can ask them a lot of questions if you’re working for a company, even about sales or sales effectiveness, and it will give you pretty good answers,” she explains. “And so I’m thinking, okay, wow, we gotta rethink this because it’s going to totally change what the expectation is out of consultants.”
Think about what that means. When clients can access competent data synthesis and basic analysis through readily available AI tools, the baseline expectation for what consultants deliver rises dramatically. Firms that continue offering answers that AI can generate will find themselves increasingly commoditized.
What you offer clients must evolve. It is no longer sufficient to provide the “what” of data and analysis. Clients now expect the “so what,” meaning the strategic story, the nuanced recommendation, and the experienced judgment that transforms information into actionable insight.
Job Decontamination for Higher-Value Work
Seger introduced a powerful concept that captures her entire AI philosophy: job decontamination. This framework uses AI to systematically remove mundane, time-consuming tasks that prevent consultants from doing their highest-value work. Think of it as clearing the clutter from your experts’ day so they can focus on what they do best.
Consider the “before” state that many consulting firms still operate within. “We might do 50 interviews,” Seger describes. “If you think about an interview that I conduct as a consultant, it can take an hour. I got 50 of them. I’ve done 50 now. Now I’ve gotta go back and listen to them. Pull out all of the relevant talking points, trends that come out of that.” She continues: “They were setting them up a year ago now in Excel spreadsheets. These guys are really good pivot tables.”
The manual burden was staggering. Beyond the 50 hours of conducting interviews, consultants spent “probably another 40 hours and one FTE re-listening to those,” cleaning data, and building basic presentations.
The “after” state represents a transformation. With AI handling the transcription and initial data synthesis, consultants now focus their energy on critical thinking, storytelling, and solving underlying client issues rather than wrestling with spreadsheets.
Why a Flawed Strategy Is Worse Than None
The most sobering insight from Seger’s experience is that AI accelerates whatever strategy you already have in place. If your operational foundation is weak, AI will not save you. It will help you fail faster and at a greater scale.
The stakes are high. According to the 2026 GTM Benchmarks Report, the revenue efficiency gap between companies that deploy AI strategically versus those that do not has reached a staggering 87%. This stark divide underscores why most AI project failures trace back to broken operations, not tech. Building a solid operational GTM framework before layering on complex AI initiatives is not optional. It is essential.
A Practical Framework for AI Adoption
A successful AI strategy starts with a “sandbox” approach, empowering curious people to experiment first and build a toolkit later. Understanding why AI matters is only the first step. The harder question is how to actually implement it. SalesGlobe’s approach offers a repeatable model for firms ready to move from theory to practice.
The Sandbox Approach to AI Innovation
Rather than dictating AI adoption from the top down, Seger empowered a curious, cross-functional team of consultants to lead the exploration. Her mandate was refreshingly simple: “Have at it.”
“We picked a sub-team and said, let us know you can play and use every tool that’s available out there,” she recalls. “We talked about what they all are. We don’t care. Use it as a sandbox, go out there and play.”
This approach succeeded because SalesGlobe hires for a specific mindset. “We hire people that are very curious. They’re continuous learners. They have a real learning mindset,” Seger explains. These are precisely the people who will drive AI adoption successfully, not because they are told to, but because they genuinely want to discover what is possible.
Slashing Interview Analysis From 40 Hours to Just One
The results of this experimentation were dramatic. Take the interview synthesis process that once consumed a full work week for one FTE.
“They gather, synthesize the interviews, we pull ’em together, they get all the talking points, everything that they need,” Seger describes. “It takes less than an hour.”
This represents a massive return on investment and directly embodies the job decontamination philosophy. Time previously spent on mechanical data processing now flows toward strategic analysis and client-facing insight development.
Building an AI Toolkit to Systematize Success
The sandbox phase produced something concrete: a vetted, standardized AI toolkit that all consultants are now expected to leverage. “Every week they report back what they’ve learned, and we went through a period of three months of vetting tools and we rolled out our first AI toolkit,” Seger explains.
The toolkit covers key operational areas including interview synthesis, data analytics, trend analysis, and presentation creation. This transition from ad-hoc experimentation to an embedded operational process transforms AI from a novelty into an operational backbone.
For firms looking to replicate this approach, the next step is to create an AI action plan that aligns with your specific operational needs and strategic goals.
How AI Frees Consultants to Solve Deeper Problems
AI doesn’t replace expert judgment; it enhances it, freeing consultants to challenge assumptions and reframe a client’s core problem. The ultimate measure of an AI consulting strategy is not efficiency gained but strategic impact delivered. When implemented correctly, AI enhances human judgment and produces superior client outcomes.
Reframing Problems AI Can’t Solve (Yet)
Seger shared a compelling case study that illustrates this principle. A CEO of a financial services company approached her with a specific request: an inside sales team and a new incentive plan.
“She said to me, I’ve got all these salespeople that go on site with the banks, but I think I need inside sales to kind of handle some calls,” Seger recalls. The client had diagnosed her own problem and arrived with a proposed solution.
After conducting thorough analysis, enabled by AI-driven efficiency that freed up consultant thinking time, the team uncovered something different. “We ended up going back to her after doing a pretty thorough assessment of the organization and saying, you don’t need inside sales, but what you do need is a business intelligence team.”
The recommendation was to provide salespeople with intelligence about member banks: their P&L profiles, their needs, and the consumer trends they should address. “That’s what we ended up doing, and it was highly successful,” Seger notes.
This outcome required consultants who could challenge assumptions and tell a compelling strategic story. “What we needed to do was have really good consultants that could tell the story as to what the client was asking for and why, and why we were making this particular recommendation.”
Training AI Agents to Enhance Human Judgment
Looking ahead, Seger envisions proprietary AI agents that amplify consultant capabilities. SalesGlobe is developing an internal tool called “Sales Globe Sage” that operates in a closed environment, learning from the firm’s best consultants.
“If you continue to feed the AI with what you did as a consultant and it learns from that, it can come back and say, have you thought about?” Seger explains. “And then you as a consultant can correct it.”
This approach addresses a fundamental limitation of open AI systems. “If I’m not an expert in sales comp, but I think I might be, and I’m just putting all this content out there and that’s picked up by AI, how will it know?” By building a custom LLM trained on verified expertise, firms can create digital partners that sharpen rather than dilute analytical quality.
Redefining the Consultant of the Future
Seger predicts that the profile of a successful consultant will fundamentally change. “We’re gonna expect and hire people that are very highly skilled, better skilled,” she says. “We want people that are thinkers and that are going to be wanting to continue to innovate and come up with new solutions, not just rely on what they’ve done before.”
The role of a future consultant is to be a strategic partner, not just an extra set of hands. They will provide unparalleled human insight, guided and amplified by AI. “I think that the face of the consultant will change and what we, the type of person we hire, and they will become the face to the client that they really can leverage as their trusted advisor.”
This evolution mirrors what leading platforms like Fullcast for RevOps are enabling: augmenting teams so they can focus on higher-value strategic work rather than manual operational tasks.
Final Thoughts
As Michelle Seger has demonstrated, the goal is not to build a more efficient firm. The goal is to build a smarter one, where technology liberates your best people to do their best thinking.
Winning in the age of AI isn’t about having the most advanced algorithms; it’s about who most effectively integrates technology to elevate human judgment. The question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but whether you will use it to scale inefficiency or to compound your strategic advantage.
For leaders ready to take the next step, start by assessing your operational foundation and identifying the mundane tasks consuming your team’s time. Empower your most curious people to experiment. The blueprint exists. The only question is whether you will follow it.
