Careful your consultants don’t end up gathering dust in the basement
Business acumen/AI & automation/
The rise of AI vibe-coding makes it even more important to strengthen business acumen among consultants.
It was really just a good conversation with a close friend, but it opened up something I hadn’t thought about myself. We ended up talking about what is happening to Business Central (formerly Navision), and why business acumen and a commercial mindset are about to matter a great deal more.
Picture a classic IT or ERP consultant ten years ago. The client rang with a specific problem: ”We need a change to our stock management, and we’re missing a report on outstanding orders.” The consultant turned up, listened, wrote down the specification, went home and spent the next 15 hours coding and configuring the solution. The client happily paid by the hour, because the consultant had a rare kind of technical magic and knew how to tie it all together. Fast forward to today. With the latest generation of artificial intelligence and generative coding tools, the purely technical execution is changing fast.
Take a traditional Navision or Business Central consultant as the example. Where you used to spend hours writing specific AL code or building integrations, you can now largely ”vibe-code” the changes, automate the configuration and turn out finished applications in record time. And yes, there are holes in it. But just think about how bad AI was at generating pictures of people two years ago.
As AI keeps developing, the technical barrier keeps dropping, and that holds across every major system, whether we are talking ERP, CRM or bespoke software.
That leaves the industry with a brutal but decisive question for tomorrow’s IT specialists: when AI handles a large part of the execution we used to do ourselves, what’s the client actually paying you for?
From technical expert to commercial adviser
If your main justification as a consultant has been to work as a human compiler, translating plain language into technical configuration, then your business model’s probably in trouble. However you feel about that.
But if you manage to move, a market opens up whose potential may be bigger and more lucrative than ever.
Because once the technical execution becomes cheap and fast, a completely new problem appears for companies: they rarely have a clear view of what they actually need, or which fundamental business problems they are trying to solve. The fact that AI can build a feature or a report in 30 seconds doesn’t make the solution clever or valuable in itself. On the contrary, companies now risk automating bad processes faster than ever. Or losing sight of how all those small applications hang together. Not to mention all the business problems we never got round to solving before, because they were far too expensive to touch.
This is where the shift happens. The consultant with a future has to move from asking ”What do you want me to build?” to asking ”Why do you want to build it, what problems are we trying to solve, and how does it affect your business and your targets?”
Three pieces of advice for future-proofing the consultant role
To stay relevant and hold on to real value in the market, you have to move up the value chain. That doesn’t require you to turn into a flashy or pushy salesperson. It requires you to build a strong business and commercial mindset. There are three disciplines to master:
01
Learn to speak business, not system
The client fundamentally doesn’t care about tables, fields, databases and API endpoints. They care about working capital, stock turnover, contribution margin and customer satisfaction. When you talk to the client, you’ve got to be able to translate the IT architecture into financial consequences. If you can show a managing director how a system change frees up cash or removes wasted admin hours, you have won. And more often than not you’ll surface a whole set of other problems you can now help them with, without ever playing the used-car salesman.
02
Go from reactive order-taker to proactive challenger
The old consultant role was, as a caricature, about saying yes to the client’s list of specifications. Yes, I know that’s overstated, because most of the good consultants I know have been genuinely good at advising. But the adviser with a future dares, even more than before, to be the irritating but necessary voice that challenges the status quo. If the client asks for a complex customisation, you’ve got to dare to dig deeper, and perhaps even say: ”We can certainly put that together, but your underlying process looks inefficient. Shouldn’t we deal with the process first, before we lock it into the system?”
03
Understand the client’s whole value chain
You can’t get by any more understanding your own module or your own technical niche in isolation. Not in the client’s systems, and not in what your consultancy actually offers. You’ve got to understand how data and business flow across the whole thing. From the first sale through the CRM system to production planning, out to the warehouse and straight into the annual accounts. The real advisory value sits in the connections, in the engine room. And funnily enough, that’s also where the hidden potential sits for bringing more consulting work back to your own company. Not built on dubious selling of products the client doesn’t need, but on real knowledge of where it actually hurts and where they need more of your help.
Business acumen and a commercial mindset
The AI train is running at full speed, and it’s hard to see exactly where it ends up. But it’s entirely clear that much of the routine work consultants, engineers and other knowledge workers have done in the past can be automated in future. Which makes now exactly the right moment to invest in sharpening business acumen and the commercial mindset.
Do you need help strengthening your commercial mindset?
Then get in touch for an informal chat. Or read more about commercial and sales leadership.
Get in touch
Did that land?
Then write me a couple of lines about what you’re dealing with.
I answer myself, and afterwards I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person.
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