AI vs. Strategy Consultant: What Replacement Actually Costs
AI produces a credible-looking deck in minutes. Whether anyone acts on it is a different question.
These figures come from the DroidWork TCO model for a Strategy Consultant at mid level, on a base salary of $122,000. The employee figure is fully loaded — benefits, payroll tax, overhead, management time and recruiting amortisation — not base salary. The AI figure sums all seven cost dimensions, not tokens alone.
Where the money actually goes
Token cost is 2.4% of total AI cost for this role. The remaining 97.6% is what standard vendor ROI models omit.
| Cost dimension | Annual |
|---|---|
| Tokens / compute | $4,371 |
| Hosting & infrastructure | $39,800 |
| Security & compliance | $53,500 |
| Process failure & rework | $33,488 |
| Residual human oversight | $44,464 |
| Total AI TCO | $184,404 |
Silent failure plus residual oversight. A strategy built on a plausible but wrong premise is expensive and slow to detect.
What AI does well here
Market research, competitive scans, financial modelling drafts, and slide production.
What stays human
Executive persuasion, organisational diagnosis, and the political work of getting a recommendation adopted.
The honest verdict
Meaningful modelled savings from a high salary base, but the deliverable is not the value — adoption is. Model this as research acceleration.
Run this for your own numbers
Pre-filled for a Strategy Consultant. Adjust salary, volume and risk to match your business — then export a board-ready PDF. Free, no login, about four minutes.
Open the Calculator for This Role →Frequently asked
Can AI replace management consultants?
It replaces a large share of the research and production work. It does not replace the credibility and organisational pressure that make a recommendation actionable.
Why do savings look high here?
High salaries and highly automatable artefacts. Read this number alongside the residual oversight line before treating it as headcount savings.
What is the risk?
Confident synthesis of shallow research. AI rarely signals when a market analysis rests on thin or outdated sourcing.
Compare other roles
Modelled estimate for planning purposes only; not financial, legal or employment advice. Salary baselines from BLS OES, Radford/Aon and Glassdoor 2025–2026 data. Full assumptions and sources are documented in the methodology, and the model is open source. Your results will differ — that is the point; run your own inputs.