AI - the biggest threat & greatest opportunity for consultancies
7 June 2025 Joe Young, Mayfly Ventures, Founding Partner
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AI effectively breaks the consulting business model. The more AI creates efficiency, the faster the race to the bottom for an industry which runs on a time and materials basis.
But not only does AI allow your competitors to deliver their consulting faster and cheaper, it also puts the ‘insights’ you might provide in the finger tips of your client. As the barriers to accessing news collapsed, the value of newspapers companies collapsed too.
I'm Joe, cofounder of Mayfly Ventures. We help Australian consulting businesses avoid being disrupted by AI and instead become the disruptors. In this article, I will outline how consulting businesses can be the disruptor and not the disrupted.
Don’t be the boiling frog
AI is slowly turning up the heat. The consultant that save 26% of time using chatGPT might save 27% next engagement. The end-client who turns to AI for a strategy may get one that is 44% as good as a consultant and next month it may be 46% as good.
Open AI now has multi-chain reasoning is which immediately bumps those percentages points in a worrying direction for consultancy firms.
I asked the Mayfly Ventures CTO Marco Santiago to explain multi chain reasoning in one sentence and he said ‘this is AI’s enhanced ability to logically connect complex ideas across domains, essentially what consultants are paid to do.’
When trends emerge, some businesses are able to ride the way while others are like Taxi drivers spending years protesting the rise of Uber while burying their head in the sand ignoring the clear pain points which Uber solves.
Over the last year, I’ve asked every consultant I’ve worked with whether they use AI. Every single one said yes.
Whether it’s lack of time, or lack of desire to change systems, ignoring the ‘desire path’ which is clearly presenting itself in the industry, will leave some businesses being the boiling frog.
Be the Golden Goose
Ok, so you’ve now spent 5 minutes getting mid way into this article, and I promise you the main takeaway at the end is not going to be, use ChatGPT. So, let’s talk about Vertical AI Agents. These are AI systems trained for a specific industry and a specific type of consulting work which transforms how an entire consulting engagement runs.
Let’s break down how AI can transform the entire consulting flow:
48 hrs of human labour into a 4 second process
The solution: Developed an advanced algorthm to compability check all goods and provide deep routing insights.
Automate back of house to unlock growth.
- Marketing and Sales
- Recruitment and HR
- Finance and Admin
Lead Scoring Engine
Capture leads from website forms
Enrich leads
Apply a custom lead scoring model
Alert sales team.
AI is here, but are you ready?
AI Audit
We analyse your team and process to identified opportunities to unlock value and create effeciency.
AI Strategy
We prescribe a strategy which includes, procedural, training and technology reccomendations.
Implementation
We build the technology and train your team to execute on the prescribed strategy.
Data Collection + Cleaning
Pair key integrations with smart forms to collect inform. Clean data with AI trained on business rules.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that within five years, AI could automate half of all entry-level white collar jobs.
Draw insights
This is the stage that most consultants use AI for now with ChatGPT.
Vertical AI Agents take this step to the next level, as you have the AI training on your companies frameworks, continously training on past reports.
Presentation
Not only are key insights extracted from the data with AI.
The end client can interact with the data and insights in real time with a live chat experience.
F@!% Time and Materials
Stop selling your time, leverage your IP and start selling outcomes at scale. Having a tech arm to your business is a fundamental shift in your business.
Most service businesses are easy to start but hard to scale. Tech businesses are the opposite, harder to start, but once you find traction, they scale efficiently. And you are in the box seat to navigate the single hardest part of growing a B2B SaaS tech businesses. Finding your first believers. Most consultancies already have them.
That means the consultancy becomes your built-in go-to-market. Work directly with your clients as design partners and warm them to be your early adopters and now you can scale in a way your traditional consultancy can’t.
At Mayfly, we run this playbook repeatably, the last two were asset optimisation for the mining industry and safety analytics for the manufacturing industry.
A product strategy which systematically removes the complexity and human labour from the process, paired with a GTM strategy which goes from in-house software to client co-usage to scaling through new clients and other consultancies.
When you’re on a call with a competitor and there is a demo of an AI agent, you want to one giving the demo, not the one forced to decide between adopting a great tool or being the protesting Taxi driver.
Unlocking the Golden Goose: The R+D Tax Incentive
Yes, building a platform takes time and money. But there’s a serious advantage here if you're in Australia: the R&D Tax Incentive. If you’re developing an AI platform, training it on your own frameworks, validating how it delivers results, refining your approach, you may be able to claim 43.5% of your eligible expenses.
And it’s not just software development. Activities like client consulting work can be classified as supporting activities if they help inform, test, or improve the AI. Many firms are surprised to learn they can claim 80–90% of their overall costs once a good R&D consultant helps frame it properly. Building such a platform means your customers can now be global, but so can your competitors. This incentive exists to encourage Australian business to innovate and lead globally.
What We Do at Mayfly Ventures
At Mayfly Ventures, we co-build the AI agent platforms of tomorrow with the industry experts. We partner with firms to design the product and GTM strategy, build the first version, and get it in the hands of real users. We’ve done this before, and we understand the unique position consulting firms are in, high trust, deep expertise, repeatable process, and untapped IP. If you’re thinking about how AI might change your business, or how to get ahead of that curve, jump on a call with me.
Don’t wait until the water’s boiling.
Let’s figure out what your golden goose looks like.
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AI Curious? Let's talk
We would love to learn more about your business and explore how we can work together.
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