AI in IT Strategy Consulting: A Human-Centered Perspective
In my twenty years working where business plans meet tech use, I've seen AI change from just an idea to a real tool we can use in our daily work. When I studied trying to apply AI (I've tested it to my main thesis) required even for simple functions, really good hardware and tricky approaches, now it's a just couple of clicks or one line of code. Reading mediums like LinkedIn those times, I've noticed both the unrealistic hopes and unnecessary fears that come with bringing AI into our work.
What I'd like to share today isn't another technical manifesto, hype recommendation to use AI, scared post how AI will replace humans, but rather a thoughtful reflection on how AI, when approached with both strategic intent and human wisdom, becomes not a replacement for expertise but rather an augmentation of it.
The Expertise Amplifier: AI as Partner, Not Replacement
The suggestion that AI somehow diminishes the value of strategic IT consulting fundamentally misunderstands both the technology and our profession. In my experience guiding digital transformation, I found the opposite to be true: AI served as an extension of my expertise, not its replacement.
Our work has always centered on bringing specialized knowledge that merges business acumen with technological understanding. We apply critical thinking across domains and develop contextual understanding of how technology enables business transformation. These distinctly human capabilities remain irreplaceable. What AI offers is a powerful set of tools that process vast amounts of information, identify patterns, and generate insights that might otherwise remain hidden, it's also able to validate if you covered all areas and if you do it with proper quality.
In one of projects I've consulted for a manufacturing company embracing stuff like Industry 4.0, IoT, Digital Twins and so on, I've seen real value from it. Previously, analyzing emerging technologies and their potential business impacts would have consumed weeks of research. With thoughtfully deployed AI assistance, I could instantly process information from thousands of sources, allowing me to focus my expertise on interpreting the results through the lens of market culture and regulatory requirements. The AI identified several emerging technical risks and business opportunities that weren't yet on my radar - not replacing my expertise but enhancing it by ensuring I had considered all relevant factors before finalizing recommendations.
Have you experienced this complementary relationship in your own professional work? The synergy emerges when we bring our contextual understanding, ethical judgment, creative problem-solving, and relationship management skills - while AI contributes processing power, pattern recognition, and analytical capabilities without fatigue or bias.
Beyond Prompt Engineering: The Mindful Strategist's Approach
One misconception I frequently encounter, particularly among European executives, is that AI integration in consulting simply means crafting clever prompts for ChatGPT and passing the outputs to clients. This approach not only devalues our role, but potentially delivers miserable results to clients who deserve better.
Effective AI integration requires a far more sophisticated approach. We must first deeply understand the client's business needs, technological landscape, organizational capabilities, and specific challenges - something no AI can adequately accomplish. Only then can we determine whether and how AI tools might contribute to solving the complex business-technology problems at hand.
When working with one customer, I used AI to generate initial hypotheses about how certain technologies could enable business transformation. But these always involved rigorous testing against real-world constraints, technical feasibility, and client-specific factors including consumer privacy expectations. The AI suggested dozens of potential technology architecture models based on global best practices, but it then came to me to evaluate which model aligned with the client's business strategy, existing technology investments, organizational culture, and change readiness.
The thoughtful consultant recognizes that AI outputs require critical evaluation. These tools can generate plausible-sounding but incorrect information, reflect biases present in their training data, or fail to account for recent developments. Our expertise becomes essential in identifying these limitations and ensuring that any AI-generated content faces careful validation before delivering client recommendations.
Protecting Client Confidentiality
Perhaps, no concern looms larger in European business contexts than data privacy and confidentiality. Clients entrust us with sensitive information - proprietary architectures, strategic plans, financial details, competitive intelligence, and security vulnerabilities. This trust forms the foundation of our client relationships and must be rigorously protected, especially when incorporating AI tools.
The good news is that responsible AI usage need not compromise client confidentiality. Through careful anonymization and abstraction, we can leverage AI capabilities while maintaining the highest standards of data protection even using public AI tools like ChatGPT of Perplexity (second one I have using on daily basic) - something I've been particularly attentive to since GDPR came into effect.
I've developed strict protocols for AI interaction in my practice. Before any client information enters an AI system, I thoroughly anonymize it - removing identifying details, changing specific figures while preserving relationships between numbers, and abstracting scenarios to eliminate any possibility of identification. Often, I reframe questions entirely to focus on patterns and principles rather than specific client situations.
For a recent manufacturing technology project in Denmark, rather than asking an AI tool to analyze "Company X's cloud migration strategy in their Nordic operations," I asked it to "analyze cloud adoption approaches for such market providers with legacy infrastructure constraints in highly regulated markets." This preserved the essence of what I demanded while eliminating any risk of exposing client identity or sensitive details.
Additionally, I maintain awareness of the varying security levels offered by different AI platforms. For highly sensitive matters, I restrict myself to AI tools deployed within secure, enterprise environments with appropriate data governance controls or simple local models disconnected from the online systems. For less sensitive analyzes, commercial tools might be appropriate, but only after rigorous anonymization.
Quality Enhancement: The True Value Proposition
A common misconception about AI, especially in strategic consulting, is that its primary benefit lies in reducing time-to-completion. While efficiency gains exist, I've found that the most significant value comes not from reducing work hours, but from dramatically enhancing the quality and comprehensiveness of the work produced within those hours. Maybe it can reduce drastically the amount of your work if your task is to copy data from system A to system B without integration.
In my experience guiding digital transformation for a wide range of companies, integrating AI rarely results in spending less time on client engagements. Instead, it allows for reallocation of that time toward higher-value activities. The hours previously spent on gathering data and initial analysis can now be invested in deeper interpretation, validation of additional scenarios, more thorough testing of recommendations, more comprehensive scenario planning, and more nuanced client communication.
For a recent public sector digital transformation project, before AI, I might have spent 70% of my time gathering and analyzing requirements and technological capabilities, leaving 30% for developing strategic insights. With AI assistance for the data-intensive portions, the ratio shifted to 40% data work and 60% strategic analysis. The total hours remained similar, but the value delivered increased substantially.
This quality enhancement manifests in several ways: AI serves as an exceptional completeness check, provides alternative perspectives that challenge my thinking, enables more comprehensive scenario planning, and enhances the evidence base supporting recommendations. The result is not that I work fewer hours, but that each hour delivers greater value to clients seeking that critical alignment between business strategy and technological implementation.
The Evolving Role: Curator, Interpreter, and Wisdom Provider
As AI capabilities advance, our role evolves but remains indispensable. Rather than being replaced by technology, we must adapt to become more sophisticated curators, interpreters, and providers of wisdom that surpasses information and even knowledge.
The strategic consultant of today serves as a curator, carefully selecting which problems benefit from AI assistance and which require purely human approaches. Not every challenge warrants technological intervention, and discernment about when and how to deploy AI represents a crucial consulting skill.
Beyond curation, we provide essential interpretation of AI-generated insights. We translate algorithmic outputs into business language, contextualize findings within the client's specific situation, and distinguish between statistical significance and business relevance.
Perhaps most importantly, we provide wisdom—the application of knowledge, experience, and judgment to complex situations where no algorithm can definitively determine the right path forward. Wisdom encompasses ethical considerations, cultural sensitivities, organizational politics, and the human dimensions of technological change that remain beyond AI's grasp.
In my work with various organizations navigating digital transformation, I've found that clients increasingly value these distinctly human contributions. As information becomes more abundant and AI-generated analysis more accessible, the premium shifts toward our ability to make sense of it all, to identify what truly matters, and to guide decision-making with both analytical rigor and human understanding.
What I've learned through years of practice is that technology—AI included—is merely a tool. The art lies in how we employ it to serve human needs, organizational goals, and societal progress. This human-centered approach to technology has always been at the heart of my consulting philosophy (not only consulting, as maybe you remember my trial in HR with Human Face initiative), and it becomes even more vital in an AI-enhanced world.