ChatGPT and AI disruption: Is consulting next in line?

SAY your company is looking to invest in an African country, specifically in a firm based in Namibia making and exporting shower curtains. Research on the market potential for this relatively obscure product yields little information. Your options are to hire a management consultant to conduct due diligence, which can take months and be very costly, or go without. Should your company proceed with the investment?

This is where generative artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. Algorithms can generate business intelligence reports in a manner analogous to a consultant analysing markets and offering advice – except for a fraction of the fee and almost in real time. Insead’s TotoGEO AI lab, for example, created algorithms that have generated 1.2 million reports covering world market outlook and trade forecasts across virtually all known product categories (especially obscure ones) for all national markets.

What does a GPT chatbot do or not do?

Here is how the process works. When you ask a chatbot – the application for which generative AI is best known – a simple question that you might ask a consultant, it kick-starts a process known as “question decomposition”. The decomposition algorithm typically deconstructs the question (or prompt) using various approaches such as natural language understanding. This involves ignoring some of the text, including “a” and “of”, identifying the subject (for example, shower curtains, copper oxychloride, 15-centimetre copper nails), finding the user’s intent and requirements. For instance, the user may ask for a poem consisting of six lines, making “six lines” a constraint on the output.