During my two-month long internship at a financial advisory and consulting firm, generative AI tools were gaining a lot of traction. Hence the firm decided to buy a premium account for the same and include it in the library of resources of the firm based on recommendations of junior analysts. My coverage was in the industries of digital tech and financial services in the firm and one of our client’s needed assistances with a go to market strategy of the new product in their platform. The tool was used extensively by some analysts and interns while some resisted the tool due to its accuracy and inability to provided complex solutions.
It was efficient in providing summary of industry reports, image solutions as well. For instance, if certain information was needed while creating slides for a client for instance what is the “total market size of cloud-based computing services in America”, prompts were directly fed to get an idea however it could be used only as an aid and not as a source in these slides. It provided us with a good starting point and source of relevant information. Some analysts even used it to create a rough template slide to work and ideate upon. My discussions with seniors at the firm made me ask my seniors that the tasks which are trivial in nature and demand a lot of effort in terms of time and research, can it not be automated. The senior director of my team answered and provided a new perspective to the same age old question. He said that the value we create for our client is not the solution, but our ability and competence which we provide, AI can read up a ton of documents and provide summaries and relevant data from it, but an analyst only can select and decipher what is relevant to the client and the problem. The learnings from the strategy will be different for each analyst in the deal which is the value added to client and not the strategy itself. With improvements in its deep learning, image processing models, it can certainly become accurate and efficient.
Surprisingly weeks after my internship was over, the final solution was submitted to the client and chatGPT recommended the same go-to market strategy for the client when I prompted it with the similar problem statement. So, the question arises, can it replace or outdate consulting and similar jobs. The answer is complex, but the nuances of a human interaction, expertise and experience can’t be always substituted with AI. This example can be a case where the solutions match but companies certainly benefit from such tools in their arsenal as an aid and rather as the complete solution provider.
The name of the client has not been shared due to NDA.
