From up-or-out to many specialists

To realize all these new opportunities that artificial intelligence, automated consultancy, and Virtual Consultants bring, you need new full-time professionals to occupy completely new roles. A consultancy firm cannot rely just on the wits of the colleagues on the bench. Neither can it rely on, say, a staff department like Marketing only because they manage the corporate website. New jobs will emerge that must be ingrained within each practice. Here are some of these:

            Product Manager. Patterns require scale. Scale requires repetition. Repetition requires thinking about how to serve different clients with the same service best. The product manager is partly a consultant, a designer, and partly a marketeer. He/she helps the practice to move from the N=1 mentality ("Every client is unique") to productized thinking.

Alerts Programmer. Automated consultancy lives from alerts: let the machine do the work. The alerts programmer knows best how to tune that machine; how to work with the sensitivity of automated triggers. Too many alerts and consultants waste precious time on false alarms. Too few alerts and the client's project goes into haywire long before everyone realizes it.

Algorithm Engineer. An automated consultancy platform can do only so much. The AE is a unique brand of data scientists that designs new kinds of analysis, often fuelled by the availability of new types of data. How to predict the spread of the transformation through the organization? Which fears lie behind that non-response? What management style works best for technology adoption? The AE will tell.

            Taxonomy Strategist. A partly seasoned consultant, often academic, and certainly a diplomat. The TS unites the individual practices to contribute to an ever-expanding cross-practice data model. She is judged on her ROA (Return on Algorithms).

            As these new jobs touch the very fundamentals of giving advice, they should not be regarded as 'just' jobs but should be part of the firm's career ladder. If you are the firm's chief HR person, and you have 21 partners and only two algorithm engineers: whom would you like to recruit and develop? Exactly! Partners will likely remain the end-responsible person, but alternative careers will blossom next to them.