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How AI Is Quietly Rewriting Consulting—One Collapsed Phase at a Time
Over the last year, something has been shifting in the supply chain services industry. Not the usual cycle of new frameworks or delivery accelerators — something deeper. I kept noticing it on our own projects.
- Timelines were dropping.
- Workshops were becoming more productive.
- Design sessions were sharper.
- Documentation became instantaneous.
- And the boundary between discovery, design, and build started blurring.
I couldn’t quite explain it, but I could feel it. AI wasn’t just making consultants faster. It was changing the structure of how consulting work happens.
The Conversation That Sparked It
A few weeks ago, Vineet and I spent an entire day whiteboarding a simple question: “If AI is truly disrupting the services business, how exactly is it doing it?” We both felt the change — but we couldn’t describe the mechanics. So we did something very consulting-like: We went back to our own delivery stories.
- Project by project.
- Phase by phase.
- Workflow by workflow.
And that’s when the pattern became obvious. Across value discovery, BRDs, functional design, testing cycles, content creation, even hypercare. We were already using AI everywhere — organically, without a formal plan. Not because it was mandated. But because it made us sharper, faster, and clearer.
From Hard to Imagine → Obvious
One of our senior colleagues, Heera, had been talking about “phase crunching” for months. Most of us nodded — but honestly, few of us could visualize it. Consulting phases are sacred, right? They don’t… disappear. So we tried something simple: Pick one phase → apply AI → observe. We started with value discovery.
Can AI:
- Read public company information?
- Extract supply chain signals from annual reports?
- Interpret CEO priorities?
- Turn that into a narrative on where supply chain can create value?
The answer: easily.
And once you have a crisp value narrative, everything else begins to accelerate:
- BRD drafts become a prompt away
- Functional flows get auto-generated
- Sample datasets appear on demand
- Walkthroughs turn into instant clickable prototypes
- So we tested the next phase.
And the next. And honestly—it shocked us.
The Moment Everything Clicked
A vague customer statement like: “We want better supplier collaboration.” Suddenly became a working solution, in the same meeting:
- Business narrative
- Opportunity map
- BRD skeleton
- Functional design outline
- Mock screens
- Test data
- Value model
- All created within hours, not weeks.
This is when the insight finally landed: AI doesn’t speed up consulting phases — it collapses them. Discovery → BRD → design → build → test are no longer separate steps. They merge into a single, collaborative loop between customer + consultant + AI.
The cost of iteration? Near zero.
The speed of iteration? Almost instant.
This is what I call pole vaulting the services model. You don’t climb the maturity curve — you fly over it.
What This Means for Supply Chain Consulting
When phases compress, the entire consulting model shifts.
1. Time-to-Value Shrinks — Dramatically: Months become weeks. Weeks become days.The early answer emerges faster, so the right answer emerges sooner.
2. Delivery Risk Drops: Real-time visualization during workshops helps customers “see” the solution early. Misalignment reduces. Rework reduces.
3. Implementation Becomes Cheaper & More Predictable: If BRDs, functional outlines, datasets, and design flows can be generated instantly, more human effort shifts to validation and refinement.
4. Consultants Become AI-Native: The role evolves from “document creators” to: Real-time co-creators, Problem framers, Synthesis experts, Arbitrators of what’s viable. AI handles the mechanical middle. Humans handle meaning and judgment.
5. Co-Creation Becomes the Default: Instead of waiting for documents weeks later, customers build alongside us — live.
Where We’re Taking This Next
We’ve started a deeper initiative at Smartlinks: Re-examining every project phase across our value chain and asking: Where can AI extract productivity and transform the experience?
Not theoretically — but practically.
By looking at:
- How solutioning happens
- How requirements flow
- How designs evolve
- How testing is orchestrated
- How value is tracked
And then redesigning roles, workflows, and accelerators to fit an AI-native delivery model. The goal is simple: Not to “use AI” on top of old methods, but to reimagine the methods themselves.
The Future Belongs to AI-Native Service Firms
AI isn’t a tool. It’s becoming an operating system for consulting. The firms that win won’t just deploy AI. They will think, design, deliver, and sustain in AI-native ways. We’re early in this journey, but the shift feels unmistakable.
- Phases are collapsing.
- Value is accelerating.
- Customers are co-creating.
- Consultants are evolving.
And the services model we’ve known for decades is being rewritten in front of us. This is where the next decade of supply chain transformation will be shaped.
And we’ve begun.