Strategy Consulting Tools: Beyond ChatGPT

If a plumber arrived at your house carrying nothing but a Swiss Army knife, you would probably hesitate before letting them start work. It is a clever, versatile tool, but you would expect a professional to arrive with specialist equipment and the experience to know when to use it.

Clients should expect the same from their strategy consultants.

ChatGPT, Claude and PowerPoint can all be valuable strategy consulting tools. But they are not, by themselves, a complete toolkit for developing and executing business strategy.

A versatile tool is not a complete toolkit

A Swiss Army knife is useful precisely because it can do many things reasonably well.

It can tighten a loose screw, cut a piece of string or open a package. You might even use it for a simple emergency repair.

But you would not choose it to install a boiler, replace a corroded pipe or diagnose a complicated pressure problem. Those jobs require tools designed for a specific purpose. They also require a professional who understands the system, can diagnose the underlying problem and knows what a safe, durable solution looks like.

Generative AI has similar strengths and limitations.

ChatGPT and Claude can help a consultant:

• Summarise research and interview notes
• Generate questions for a workshop
• Suggest alternative explanations or options
• Challenge assumptions
• Improve the wording of a report
• Produce an initial presentation structure

Those are useful capabilities. Used well, they can save time and improve aspects of the consulting process.

But strategy is not simply a collection of written outputs. Nor is it a prompt followed by a polished slide deck.

Clients are not buying prompts and presentations

Your client is not paying you merely to produce words that sound strategic.

They are paying you to help them understand their situation, make difficult choices and achieve something that matters.

That requires you to connect several kinds of work:

1. Establish the organisation’s goals and clarify what success means.
2. Gather evidence about its market, customers, competitors and internal capabilities.
3. Turn that evidence into meaningful strategic insights.
4. Identify and assess alternative courses of action.
5. Make explicit choices and trade-offs.
6. Translate those choices into objectives, initiatives and measures.
7. Establish accountability for execution.
8. Monitor results, learn and adapt.

A useful definition of strategy is a plan to achieve a goal within a given context. Each component matters. A plan without a clear goal can become activity without purpose. A goal without a plan is an aspiration. Both can fail if they ignore the organisation’s context and constraints.

The quality of the work also depends on the quality of the thinking behind it. Filling in a SWOT template, for example, does not guarantee insight. Each observation still needs to be specific, supported and capable of answering the question: “So what?”

A general-purpose AI assistant can contribute to that process. It cannot provide the entire process.

A slide deck is a snapshot, not a strategy system

PowerPoint remains useful. It can help you explain recommendations, guide a discussion and communicate a strategy to different audiences.

Its weakness is not presentation. Its weakness is continuity.

Once the final steering committee meeting is over, what happens to the analysis behind the slides? Where are the assumptions recorded? How are decisions connected to initiatives? Who owns each action? How are changes tracked? How does the client learn whether the strategy is working?

In many engagements, the important work becomes fragmented across presentations, spreadsheets, documents, emails and chat histories. The strategy may look coherent in the final deck while the evidence, decisions and execution plans behind it remain disconnected.

That creates a problem for the client and the consultant.

The client receives an artefact when what they need is an ongoing management discipline. The consultant must recreate structures and reconnect information for every engagement.

Specialist tools should support your method

Owning specialist software does not make someone a capable strategy consultant, just as buying a set of plumbing tools does not make someone a plumber.

Professional judgement still comes first.

You need to understand which questions to ask, which evidence to trust, which frameworks fit the situation and when a familiar model is likely to obscure more than it reveals. You must be able to challenge senior stakeholders constructively, recognise false consensus and distinguish an attractive idea from a coherent strategic choice.

The role of specialist technology is to support that expertise.

A good strategy platform should help you:

• Apply a consistent process without forcing every client into an identical answer
• Select appropriate tools and frameworks for the problem
• Preserve the evidence supporting important conclusions
• Connect insights to choices, objectives, initiatives and measures
• Involve client teams without losing control of the process
• Maintain a clear record of decisions and responsibilities
• Move naturally from strategy development into execution
• Review and adapt the strategy as circumstances change

This is the distinction between software that helps you create content and software that helps you manage strategy.

There are many excellent strategy books and standalone frameworks. The practical challenge is integrating their ideas into a coherent process and applying them to a client’s particular circumstances.

Where AI belongs in strategy consulting

AI should not be excluded from the strategist’s toolkit. It should be incorporated thoughtfully.

It can accelerate research, expose gaps, generate alternatives and help consultants examine an issue from different perspectives. It can also reduce time spent on lower-value administrative work.

But AI output must remain subject to professional scrutiny.

A plausible answer may be factually wrong. A neat recommendation may rest on assumptions the client does not share. Sensitive information may require careful handling. An option that looks attractive in isolation may conflict with another part of the strategy.

Most importantly, generative AI does not carry responsibility for the advice.

You do.

The opportunity is therefore not to replace consulting methods with prompts. It is to combine human judgement, a rigorous method, specialist strategy technology and AI in a way that improves the client outcome.

A lesson from my own consulting work

I founded StratNav to address a problem I repeatedly encountered as a strategy consultant: organisations could invest considerable time and effort in developing a strategy, yet still struggle to execute it consistently.

The problem was seldom a shortage of documents.

It was the difficulty of keeping analysis, choices, plans, responsibilities and results connected after the initial strategy work had finished. Traditional office tools could store each part, but they did not naturally maintain the relationships between them.

That experience shaped StratNav as a collaborative platform for strategy development and execution. It brings commonly used strategy tools and frameworks into one structured environment, while connecting the work of analysis and decision-making to the realities of implementation.

AI is part of that environment, but it is not the whole environment.

That distinction matters.

Your toolkit is part of your consulting proposition

Clients increasingly have access to the same general-purpose AI products as their consultants.

They can ask ChatGPT for a SWOT analysis. They can ask Claude to summarise a market report. They can use AI to outline a strategy presentation.

If your offer amounts to doing those things on their behalf, it will become increasingly difficult to explain why they need you.

Your differentiation lies elsewhere:

• The quality of your judgement
• The structure of your method
• Your ability to ask better questions
• Your experience of comparable situations
• The way you engage and align stakeholders
• Your ability to connect strategic choices to execution
• The tools you use to make your work repeatable, collaborative and durable

AI can strengthen those capabilities. It should not become a substitute for them.

What is in your strategy consulting toolkit?

Before your next client engagement, ask yourself a few uncomfortable questions.

Can you show the client how you will move from evidence to insight, and from insight to choice?

Can you trace a recommendation back to the assumptions and information supporting it?

Can the client continue using the strategy after your engagement ends?

Can you monitor execution without rebuilding the plan in a separate collection of spreadsheets?

And if a prospective client asks what makes your approach different from combining ChatGPT with PowerPoint, do you have a convincing answer?

A Swiss Army knife deserves a place in many toolboxes. It should not be the entire toolbox.

The same is true of generative AI.

If you want to combine your consulting expertise with a purpose-built platform for collaborative strategy development and execution, explore StratNav for consultants.