Guess who's knocking? AI discovers the Council Chamber.
- Gabriel Casara
- Nov 20
- 3 min read
From operational tool to strategic voice: how artificial intelligence is beginning to take over the space of consulting firms and influence decisions at the highest corporate level.
Gabriel Casara, CGO of BlueMetrics
AI-generated summary:
This article discusses how artificial intelligence is moving beyond being merely an operational tool—focused on automating tasks, reports, and basic analyses—to becoming a strategic voice within companies, capable of influencing decisions at the C-level and board of directors. Functioning similarly to traditional consultancies, but with greater scale and speed, AI is already generating diagnoses, simulations, and strategic recommendations comparable to or superior to those of human analysts. Studies by the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey show that, in quantitative scenarios, AI can even surpass human leaders in efficiency, although it still depends on executives to create truly disruptive strategies. The future points to hybrid boards, where AI agents and human leadership work together, and the competitive advantage will lie in how to integrate these intelligences for faster, more accurate, and transformative decisions.
AI is climbing the ranks. How far will it go?
The corporate use of artificial intelligence is, so far, largely operational. Automating tasks, speeding up reports, summarizing meetings, generating documents in seconds. More recently, some tools are also beginning to assist in scenario analysis and projections. But the disruption that is looming is more profound: it can scale from the factory floor to the manager's desk, the C-level executive, and even the boards of directors.
This is where a provocation arises. AI, applied at the strategic level, works exactly like consulting firms have always worked—only better. The classic consulting model is based on collecting facts and data, analyzing historical series, assembling frameworks, and building strategic models from past business cases. This is precisely what large language models, such as GPTs, do: they recombine existing data, test hypotheses, identify patterns, and offer consistent recommendations. But on a scale and at a speed that no army of human analysts could replicate.
What is the purpose of consulting services today?
The Economist article, “Who needs Accenture in the age of AI?” (June 26, 2025), describes this dilemma clearly. While for decades companies like Accenture thrived by translating complexity into strategy, today the very logic of that business is at risk. Why outsource diagnostics and action plans when internal systems can already generate comparable—and often superior—analyses? When strategic intelligence becomes part of the corporate infrastructure itself, the intermediary becomes superfluous.
This is not just theory. A Harvard Business Review article, published in 2024, argues that in several typical CEO functions—such as product portfolio decisions or capital allocation—AI already performs more efficiently than human leaders, especially in highly quantitative contexts (HBR, “AI Can (Mostly) Outperform Human CEOs” ). Similarly, McKinsey points out that AI is transforming the very practice of strategic development, enabling faster diagnoses, sophisticated simulations, and a reduction in the human biases that often distort choices (McKinsey, “How AI is transforming strategy development” ).
Still, there is a boundary to be considered. LLMs are trained on past data. Their power lies in recombining what has already been seen, not in inventing what has never been tried. This means that, while AI is capable of projecting scenarios based on facts and evidence, the creation of genuinely new strategies—those that break established patterns and open up new markets—remains dependent on human leadership.
A false dilemma
It's plausible to imagine that future boards will be hybrid: composed of both AI agents—specialized in finance, risk, market, or operations—and human executives capable of translating these diagnoses into business insights. In this scenario, the competitive advantage will not lie in choosing between humans or machines, but in how to integrate the two for faster, more informed, and strategic decisions.
AI has already discovered the boardroom. The question for companies now is not whether it will have a seat at the table, but how—and in what roles. The organizations that answer this question first will likely set the pace for the next great wave of business competitiveness.
Gabriel Casara is CGO at BlueMetrics and believes in the value of intelligence, whether artificial or not.
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