How much of my workday as a consultant can Chat GPT automate?
Everyone and their mum is using Chat GPT these days. Literally. My own mum is using Chat GPT to help her on her work with innovation policy and research. My own typical workday as a consultant in a data and analytics team is rife for AI augmentation. However, when most of my day consists of meetings, I don’t feel like I’ll be replaced by Chat GPT just yet. No matter how much other technologists might tell you.
To start on a high-level, I gave Chat GPT a generic schedule that I would normally do:
These are reasonable tips and here is the schedule it actually gave me:
If we all had our own personal GPT-PAs, it would be amazing. It can potentially help me out during the actual meetings as well. Microsoft is already rolling out Chat GPT for Teams that will automatically take the minutes and summarize them for you.
Most of my current actual client work involves writing SQL queries or building dashboards. For compliance purposes, I don’t think I can paste some of my queries in Chat GPT to review which means analyst positions are safe for now due to cybersecurity risks. However, this post on how Chat GPT can replace a SQL analyst was particularly eye opening. It would only be a matter of time until our future offering would be helping companies to set up these kinds of solutions. It would probably take a long time before companies have their own internal accurate LLM functioning. Or their lawyers and compliance officers figure out a safe way to use products like this.
I don’t doubt that in the future, PowerBI or Tableau would only require a text prompt to create a dashboard. I asked Chat GPT to make a standard sales dashboard for me. It did not make a visual as it is not capable of doing it yet but suggested 10 possible charts including KPIs, chart types and what data is included.
For our business development work, I found Chat GPT to be useful in helping me research potential companies and what to pitch to them. Additional Googling was needed as Chat GPT was built on 2021 data and I needed to check more updated figures.
My consulting peers currently use it for summarization and categorization tasks which saves clients hours in billable work. With Copilot coming up for Excel and Powerpoint, we will be even more productive. Some startups have already started making generative slide decks such as slidesai.io and chatba.com (cheekily called Chat BCG earlier).
Next, I asked Chat GPT what else it can do for consulting and it gave me a laundry list of activities including but not limited to analysis, research, process optimization and forecasting. I am not surprised at all that people online are using it to pass a McKinsey case. Seems like our careers are still secure.
In the end, I still find it useful for writing common emails such as introducing two people to each other. I also attended a presentation where the speaker used it to write his closing slide speech. At its current state, I would estimate that I could use Chat GPT for 10–20% of my usual activities. If it starts to perform even better and make fewer mistakes, I would bump it up to 30. However, it would still be unable to handle all the important creative, social and management aspects of my job. According to FastCompany, it is the most in demand skill that ChatGPT cannot do. The next rung on my corporate ladder still seems in reach as of now, but how long until GPT becomes the next micromanager at your office?
