Consulting Industry Practitioner Brian Sommer: AI Can Replace Junior Consultants' Document Work, but Not Peer Review That Polishes Ideas from 80% to 95-97%
Senior consulting practitioner Brian Sommer uses his own experience to illustrate that AI can already complete a large amount of work previously requiring junior consultants—such as parsing documents, drafting presentations, running forecasts, and automating software implementation—but that human consultants remain irreplaceable because AI lacks true critical thinking, audit trail awareness, and the ability to judge novel angles. He describes how the consulting industry's traditional peer review mechanism polishes an 80% complete proposal into a 95-97% solution, and points out that the industry's contract model is shifting from time-and-materials billing to outcome-based billing.
Brian Sommer founded his first consulting firm during his junior year of college, and later worked at Arthur Andersen (the predecessor to Accenture). In an article published on November 5, 2026, he responded to a recurring question: Are consultants still indispensable? His answer is yes—but for reasons more specific than usual.
Sommer first acknowledges that the impact of AI on entry-level consulting work is real. Generative AI can parse billions of client documents to identify trends, summarize content, and structure data; it can draft consulting presentations and generate research reports. Algorithmic AI can rapidly process vast data sources to create financial and operational forecasts. More critically, ERP, HR, and financial accounting software vendors are using AI to automate implementation tasks—data cleansing, pre-configuring software, inserting regulatory requirements, and embedding industry-specific processes—tasks that previously required large teams of junior consultants and integrators.
But Sommer’s core argument is not that AI cannot do these things, but rather that what remains after AI completes them constitutes the true value of consulting. He illustrates this with two personal experiences: A professional he has known for years handed him an AI-generated 'result,' treating an extrapolated trend line as actual data—the absence of an audit trail pointing back to the source data should have been a massive red flag, yet she failed to notice. In another instance, a savvy financial analyst showed him AI-generated charts that looked visually impressive but had completely overlooked several subtle factors that needed to be considered.
Sommer believes this touches on the core difference between what AI does poorly and humans do well: thinking. AI developers like to claim that AI can reason, but this is not the same as deep, considered analysis, assessment, and the application of multiple perspectives. Humans can engage in critical thinking and incorporate unique angles that were not part of an AI’s original training data. While AI excels at re-solving old problems, one-off, weird, or unique matters fall outside its database, large language models, and training sets.
So who performs the novel work that AI cannot? Sommer’s answer is consultants. He describes how great consulting actually works: When facing a thorny client project, the best approach is to convene a group of senior consultants who understand the client, the industry, market trends, value creation, and organizational dynamics. This knowledge may be partially codified in the models used by AI tools, but certain elements—such as nuance—remain beyond AI’s capabilities.
He provides a specific mechanism: Great consultants know they might independently come up with only 80% of a good idea, but a team is needed to truly refine and expand that initial concept, pushing the 80% solution to a 95-97% level of excellence. This is why consultants socialize new ideas, concepts, and approaches with their peers. At Arthur Andersen, all matters required a 'second partner review' before being shared with clients. This process serves both as a quality check and character building: presenting your best idea to peers and superiors, watching it get dissected, is humbling. However, the key point is that the knowledge gained from these new inputs and perspectives can dramatically improve recommendations to the client.
Sommer compares this review experience to old-fashioned software code reviews: A programmer spends significant time and energy creating a program, and during the review must explain and defend their code to peers and technical leaders. Decisions and designs are dissected, sometimes feeling quite personal. These review techniques are designed to produce the highest quality results possible for a client. While AI tools can sometimes produce good results, great ones will still require eagle-eyed experts who understand and test for nuances that may not exist in AI data stores.
The article also addresses an apparent paradox: If AI is eroding the foundational work of the consulting industry, why is Anthropic entering this market? Sommer cites an analysis by Dr. Florian Smeritschnig on StrategyCase.com: Anthropic is entering consulting through two joint ventures. The first is Ode, a US firm partnered with Anthropic, backed by approximately $1.5 billion in committed capital from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs, launched in July 2026. The second is a consultancy built with London private equity firm Hg, reported by the Financial Times on October 23, due to open in London and Berlin before the end of the year. Both ventures place engineers inside client companies to build AI systems based on Claude.
Smeritschnig concludes that Anthropic’s move into consulting most heavily impacts the AI implementation businesses of Accenture and the Big Four accounting firms, while affecting McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company primarily through their engineering arms. This is the strongest evidence so far that AI creates consulting work rather than eliminating it. Sommer adds a point from Jose Esteves on LinkedIn: Companies like Anthropic may use these consulting engagements to strengthen relationships with large enterprises.
Sommer also highlights a structural challenge facing the traditional consulting industry: the apprenticeship model. If fewer junior consulting staff are needed, how will the long-established training process function? How will consultancies develop future business leaders? This is not just a human resources issue, but a risk of breaking the entire chain of industry knowledge transfer.
Finally, Sommer observes a shift in the industry’s economic model. He notes that service contracts will increasingly move toward outcome/deliverable-based or fixed-fee models, while time-and-materials billing is rapidly declining. He mentions that Accenture’s CEO recently purchased $3 million worth of Accenture stock, which many viewed as a signal of confidence in the company’s future. However, Sommer remains cautious: while he appreciates this confidence, he believes we still need to observe how new market entrants, economic models, and product offerings will affect the sector.
The value of this article lies in its specificity. It is not an abstract declaration that 'AI will not replace humans,' but rather a practitioner’s explanation, using concrete failure cases, descriptions of collaborative mechanisms, and observations on industry economics, detailing exactly where AI breaks down in consulting work, why it breaks down, and how this breakdown is changing the industry’s pricing logic and competitive landscape.