thesis subject :
Towards a reconfiguration of the perceived value of management consulting in the AI era: rethinking the co-creation of managerial knowledge.
Thesis start date :
Septembre 2024
Name of thesis supervisor(s) :
Nathalie Gardes (Bordeaux) & Eric Milliot (Nantes)
Thesis abstract :
Our research explores the perceived value of consulting in the AI era, and the impact of a possible shift in this value when the outcome is co-produced with AI.
The consulting sector employs more than 5.5 million people and is at the heart of ongoing transformations, since knowledge lies at the core of its business model, and this knowledge is bound to be at least partially automated by AI. Consulting is also a key promoter of this transformation.
We adopt Turner’s (1982) approach to apprehend the goals of consulting activities, classified as “traditional” (those described in the terms of reference) and “additional” (far more intangible, i.e. ‘building consensus and commitment’), and Ciampi’s perspective to assess the foundation of its value: improving client performance through the creation of managerial knowledge (Ciampi, 2017; Turner, 1982). For these authors, the nature of value creation is primarily cognitive. Ciampi in particular claims a deliberately distinct position from the traditional academic view of consulting, in which the consultant’s role is to apply existing knowledge to the client’s context, as opposed to the researcher whose role is to generate new knowledge. Although, Ciampi acknowledges, consulting is too often a missed opportunity to realize this potential for knowledge creation.
We question the opportunity offered by the adoption of AI endowed with astonishing new capabilities (autonomy, problem-solving, decision-making in ambiguous and uncertain contexts; Baird & Maruping, 2020), to contribute to realizing consulting’s potential for creating managerial knowledge, and consequently, value creation.
On the one hand, according to the Recursive Theory of Organizational Knowledge Augmentation (Harfouche et al., 2023), AI does contribute to enhancing organizational knowledge, when employed within a framework of “Informed AI with a human in the loop.” On the other hand, according to the Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004), value necessarily results from co-creation between provider and client. In other words, it emerges from interaction (mutual or reciprocal action or influence, Weijs-Pérée et al., 2019). The perception of this value necessarily comes from the client, as does its ultimate creation, at the time of use of the product or service (Grönroos & Voima, 2013).
Yet, we observe that despite the adoption of AI by both consultants and clients, consulting interactions remain binary (consultant–client dyad): when AI is used by the parties in the context of a service delivery, it is used in an opaque manner, and the consultant remains the pilot of the relationship with the client (situation S2 in our theoretical model).
In the context of the automation/augmentation paradox (Raisch & Krakowski, 2020), which adds further tension to the consulting sector, our research proposition is that the integration of AI as an actor forming a triad in interactions represents an opportunity for the consulting sector to rethink its source of value creation in the AI era (situation S3).
We plan to test our proposition using a qualitative approach, through two successive case studies:
An experiment in the form of a Hackathon, led by Oxford professor Ajit Jaokar, which places around twenty domain experts in a situation where they co-create a complex “no-code” application with AI (in the role of developer).
This co-creation leads to a presentation to a potential user for evaluation (in the role of user). We take part in this experiment as a developer (experiencing the phenomenon directly).
The objective is to analyze the perception of value when a product is co-produced with AI, from both the developer’s and the user’s perspective, through about twenty semi-structured interviews with participants.
Observation within a consulting firm, which uses AI in the context of its services.
The objective is to explore, in practice, how the consultant interacts with AI in the course of their work, and to test the relevance of our proposition.
