Consultants use ChatGPT for research and brainstorming, then stop.

When I asked a consultant at a top strategy firm what frustrated him most about using AI, he said:

“I don’t really know how I can leverage AI to boost my productivity beyond research and brainstorming. And the same for basically any other consultant in our office. We don’t know how to push it beyond that.”

a strategy consultant

By February 2026 I had heard a version of that answer in about 30 conversations, with people at top strategy firms, the Big 4, boutique consultancies, and venture capital firms. All of them use ChatGPT, and it works well enough for research and ideation. Then they hit a wall: context gets bloated, copying and pasting wears thin, and every new chat starts from nothing.

Other tools remove that wall. Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot CLI can read your files, build spreadsheets, draft decks, and remember last week’s work. They act on your computer instead of only talking to you, and many firms already give their people access to at least one of them.

Few consultants open them, because these tools were built for developers and everyone assumes you need to code. A former colleague put it plainly:

“I’ve never used them because I don’t write code.”

a former consulting colleague

You do not need to code. You talk to these tools the way you talk to ChatGPT, and they can carry out the work. Since July 2026 the Claude and ChatGPT apps have both had the same kind of tool built in: Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work.