Best AI for Strategy Consultants

Strategy consulting has a particular tension at its core: the analysis needs to be deep enough to be credible, but the recommendation needs to be clear enough that a CEO or board can act on it quickly. That requires both rigorous research and the ability to communicate complex findings simply. The consultants who do this best spend their time on the actual strategic judgment. They've minimized the time on the mechanical research and writing work that supports it.

AI tools have made a real difference here, specifically for the secondary research, the synthesis, and the written output. The part that AI can't replace is the kind of insight that comes from spending time in the client's business, understanding the dynamics that don't show up in market data, and making the judgment call about what the analysis means for this company in this situation.

Here's what strategy consultants are getting real value from.

What strategy consultants need from AI

Strategy work requires more specificity about what "quality" means:

Analytical rigor in output: Does the AI produce analysis that holds up to a tough question? Or does it produce confident-sounding output that falls apart when pushed?

Source quality and traceability: Strategy recommendations need to be grounded in credible sources. Unsourced claims about market size or competitive position don't survive a client challenge.

Board-level writing quality: The written output needs to work for a senior executive audience: concise, structured, no jargon, clear on the so-what.

Data handling for sensitive engagements: Strategy work often involves M&A, competitive positioning, and board-level discussions that can't go through public AI tools carelessly.

1. Claude (claude.ai)

Claude is the analytical writing tool that fits strategy consulting work best. The combination of reasoning quality and writing quality is the right match for an environment where the output will be scrutinized by senior executives and where hedged, nuanced analysis is more valuable than confident oversimplification.

The practical applications in strategy consulting are broad. For competitive analysis, give Claude the landscape overview you've built from secondary research, your framework for evaluating competitive position, and ask it to synthesize a view of where your client sits relative to each competitor and what the implications are. It produces a structured analysis that identifies the strategic logic clearly.

For board memo drafting, Claude handles the executive communication register well. The structure it produces for a board memo, situation overview, key findings, strategic options, recommendation, and risk considerations, is the structure that executive audiences expect. The language is direct and professional without being jargon-heavy. For a strategy consultant who's writing board materials regularly, Claude is faster than starting from scratch and usually produces better structure than a first draft under time pressure.

For scenario analysis and strategic options structuring, Claude is useful as a thinking partner. Give it the client's strategic situation and ask it to articulate three to four realistic strategic options with the logic behind each. Ask it to identify the assumptions that would need to hold for each option to be the right answer. Ask it to write the bear case for your current preferred recommendation. This kind of analytical sparring improves the quality of the final work.

Best for: Board memo drafting, competitive analysis synthesis, strategic options structuring, executive communication. Pricing: Free tier; Claude Pro at $20/month.

2. Perplexity

Perplexity is where the competitive intelligence research starts. Before a client engagement and throughout the analysis phase, Perplexity provides current, cited information from public sources: competitor moves, market developments, executive changes, M&A transactions, analyst views, and regulatory developments.

For strategy work, the competitive intelligence application is the most valuable. A client wants to know how their three main competitors are positioning for a specific market shift. Perplexity pulls recent announcements, product launches, investor day commentary, and analyst notes for each competitor in minutes, with citations you can verify. That research task, done manually through a search workflow, takes two to three hours. With Perplexity, it takes 30 minutes.

For market analysis, Perplexity covers the macro layer well: industry growth projections from analyst reports, regulatory trends, technology developments that are reshaping the competitive landscape. For the strategy consultant who needs to be current on a market they haven't worked in recently, this orientation research is fast and reliable.

The limitation: Perplexity is public-source only. For anything involving proprietary market data, primary research, or client-specific competitive positioning, it's a starting point, not the complete picture.

Best for: Competitive intelligence from public sources, market analysis, regulatory landscape, current news and analyst commentary. Pricing: Free tier; Perplexity Pro at $20/month.

3. Glean

Glean is the institutional memory layer for strategy consultancies with significant research history. Strategy firms build up an enormous amount of relevant prior work: sector analyses, competitive landscapes, strategic frameworks applied to similar client situations, and market research from past engagements. Glean makes that history searchable and retrievable.

The use case that matters most: you're starting a new engagement in retail banking strategy and your firm has done three relevant engagements in adjacent areas over the past four years. Without Glean, finding those prior analyses requires asking people and hoping the right person remembers. With Glean, you search in plain language and the relevant documents surface in seconds.

For knowledge-intensive strategy practices where the institutional expertise is a significant part of the value proposition, this retrieval capability has a real impact on engagement quality. Senior consultants know what the firm has done; junior consultants don't, and Glean closes that gap.

Glean is enterprise-only. It requires implementation and IT involvement. For boutique strategy practices without significant document history, the setup cost exceeds the value. For established strategy consultancies managing large knowledge repositories, it's worth evaluating.

Best for: Established strategy firms with significant prior engagement research that needs to be findable and reusable. Pricing: Enterprise only; custom pricing.

4. Gamma

Gamma handles the production of strategy presentations. Strategy deliverables are fundamentally slide-based: the final output for a board, a CEO, or an executive committee is a deck, and producing that deck from the analysis document is a translation step that takes real time in PowerPoint.

Gamma compresses that translation step. Give it the structure and content of your analysis, and it produces a deck that works as a starting point for the final deliverable. For the internal work-in-progress decks, client interim updates, and the rounds of revision that happen during an engagement, Gamma is significantly faster than PowerPoint.

For strategy consultants specifically, the template quality in Gamma works for a strategy engagement context: it produces business presentations, not marketing slides. The layouts are appropriate for the kind of comparative and framework-based content that strategy decks contain.

The limitation is real for top-level strategy deliverables: a final board presentation for a major client warrants a properly designed slide template with precise formatting. Gamma is excellent for 80% of deck work but doesn't replace proper design resources on the presentations that matter most.

Best for: Internal decks, client working sessions, interim deliverables, and presentations where content drives the value more than design polish. Pricing: Free tier; paid plans from $10/month.

The workflow in practice

For a strategy consultant, the production cycle on a client analysis typically looks like:

Orientation and secondary research: Perplexity for current competitive intelligence and market context. Glean (if available at the firm) for prior engagement research.

Analysis and synthesis: Claude for competitive analysis synthesis, strategic options structuring, and the analytical narrative.

Written deliverables: Claude for board memos, strategic option summaries, and executive communications.

Slide production: Gamma for converting the written analysis into a deck structure that the team can edit and polish.

Claude and Perplexity together at $40/month cover the core research and analytical writing needs. Add Gamma at $10/month when slide production is a bottleneck. Glean requires a firm-level decision and enterprise procurement.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI help with the diagnostic phase of a strategy engagement?

Yes. Claude is useful for structuring the diagnostic framework: given the client's situation, what are the key hypotheses, what evidence would confirm or disconfirm each, and what data do you need to collect? This is the work that usually happens in the first week of an engagement, and having AI help structure the issue tree and hypothesis set is a meaningful speed improvement.

How do strategy consultants use AI for client interview preparation?

Claude drafts interview guides with good question structure when you give it the engagement context, the interviewee's role, and the key hypotheses you're testing. This prep work that used to take 45 minutes to an hour takes 15 minutes. The guides still need customization for the specific interviewee, but the structural work is done.

What about using AI for M&A strategy work specifically?

M&A strategy work involves highly confidential information: target identities, deal structures, board-level deliberations. Perplexity can help with public-source research on potential targets and market consolidation trends. Claude can help structure analytical frameworks and draft communications. But anything involving non-public deal information requires enterprise tools with appropriate data handling and should be governed by your firm's M&A data handling policies. Don't put acquisition target names or deal terms into consumer AI tools.