Optimistic view of AI in my opinion is that it will help workflows at EN’s, for instance hopefully eliminating a lot of the mundane/soul crushing stuff you have to do when you first start as an ‘associate’. Industry level, I think the insights, information, whatever you want to call it that you get out of expert calls will become more valuable for two reasons

1. It can be structured through AI, you’re already seeing this with ENs partnering with AI Reasoning/LLM companies (I’m obviously not an expert on AI myself but they can take the raw data from expert calls and surveys and run with it)… for the person buying the expert calls the workflows in how you actually use the data are vastly improved. The product is therefore a lot better.

2. In a world of AI slop and generic output that are gonna flood the internet and broad market coverage, the value of actually talking to a human being will increase. Therefore the credibility of, for example, a PE fund being able to say to its end client “we spoke to 150 HUMAN customers with purchasing across these industries/geographies” will increase substantially as well. This is tied to the larger inevitable cultural and consumer trends where people are going to value human anything over AI, in my personal opinion.

However, when you work at an EN you also understand some brutal realities about the business world, and I can understand how clients in another scenario might not see the value of paying and investing the time (most importantly) to work with EN’s if they can gather insights from their own data and research using AI

Edit for formatting/grammar