May (A)I Replace You? A Qualitative Case Study on Management Consultants' Perceptions of GenAI's Impact on Consulting Work - and Factors Shaping These Perceptions

Sammanfattning

The rapid emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has become an important topic in strategy talk and has attracted significant attention in business literature. While existing studies have primarily emphasized the technical capabilities and potential of GenAI, relatively little research has examined how professionals perceive and make sense of this technological shift. This gap is especially critical in knowledge-intensive contexts like management consulting, where work relies heavily on human expertise, an area now increasingly challenged by GenAI's capabilities. To address this, we sought to investigate how management consultants perceive the impact of GenAI on their work, and the factors shaping these perceptions, through an exploratory, qualitative case study at a global consulting firm. We interviewed 23 consultants across varying hierarchical positions and functions, using sensemaking theory (Weick, 1979) and the technological frames of reference framework (Orlikowski and Gash, 1994), as our guiding theoretical lenses in the analysis. Our findings reveal that GenAI is widely perceived as a productivity-enhancing tool that complements rather than replaces human expertise. However, perceptions diverge around GenAI's implications on professional learning and development, trust in their outputs, and strategic importance. These perceptions are found to be shaped by several factors including individual influences, organizational context, and anticipations of the future. Importantly, consultants emphasized the need for concrete, task-relevant examples to meaningfully integrate GenAI. These findings contribute to literature by offering a nuanced perspective of how GenAI adoption unfolds in practice, and by providing important insights for firms aiming to support sustainable and succesful GenAI integration.