A management consultant’s honest account of how the be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program rebuilt his research and slide-making workflow, ended the era of 2 AM deck nights, and got him interviews for Engagement Manager and Director roles he had stopped pushing for.
Table of Contents
- The Hidden Cost of a Consulting Career
- Why a Consultant Enrolled in an AI Careers Program
- What the be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program Offers Consultants
- 90 Days Inside the Program — What Changed on My Engagements
- The Transformation — Consulting Challenges and How AI Solved Them
- Value for Money — A Consultant’s Honest Take
- Who Among Consultants Will Benefit Most
- Final Word — Should Every Consultant Do This?
01. The Hidden Cost of a Consulting Career
Nobody tells you this when you join consulting: the thinking — the actual problem-solving, the hypothesis-building, the part you applied to consulting for — is barely 20% of the job. The rest is invisible. Desk research. Expert call notes. Excel models that need re-cutting because the client changed scope. Slides that get redone three times because the partner doesn’t like the storyline. Client follow-up emails. Internal reviews. Steering committee decks. Status updates to the engagement manager. Friday night slide marathons before Monday-morning readouts.
After nine years in consulting — first at a Big 4 strategy practice, then at a boutique strategy firm in Gurgaon — I had built a reputation for being the consultant who could carry a workstream. The one who wrote tight storylines. The one who never missed a Monday deadline.
But carrying workstreams has a cost. I was averaging 70-hour weeks during heavy engagements. My weekends were “free” only between projects. I was watching peers from my B-school cohort move into Engagement Manager and Director roles at faster firms while I stayed buried in research decks, model rebuilds, and slide formatting.
Then a friend who had moved in-house sent me a link to the be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program. I already use ChatGPT for desk research, I thought, I don’t need a course for it. I was wrong about that.
02. Why a Consultant Enrolled in an AI Careers Program
My first reaction was that I already knew enough about AI. I had been using ChatGPT for over a year — for executive summaries, expert call write-ups, the occasional industry primer. I assumed a structured program would just be a slower version of what I was already doing.
But one line in the program description made me reconsider: “built for working professionals across every function who want to make AI work inside their existing role.”
What I had been doing with AI was casual and limited to the easy bits — summarising things I already understood. What the program promised was systematic — workflows, prompt libraries, templates, and a clear path to embed AI across the full consulting workflow, from problem structuring to final readout.
I enrolled. By the end of the second session, I realised I had been using AI at maybe 15% of its actual capability for the work consultants actually do.
The be10x program doesn’t teach you what AI is. It teaches you how to architect AI into your engagement workflow so it stops being a search shortcut and starts being a leverage multiplier.
What convinced me to commit fully:
- The trainers asked participants about their function before introducing any tool — context-first, not tool-first
- The use cases included strategy, research, financial modelling, and stakeholder communication — not just summarisation
- Live sessions meant I could ask, “how do I build a competitor benchmarking deck faster?” and get a working pipeline
- The community included consultants, strategy leads, ex-consultants in industry, and boutique firm founders — peers who spoke my language
- The focus was on advance AI skill for career growth, not learning AI as a hobby
03. What the be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program Offers Consultants
The program is built around producing real, deployable workflows. Here is what I worked through as a consultant:
Module 1: Advanced AI Tools for Professional Use
- ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot — used as analytical and storyline co-pilots, not novelty chat tools
- Prompt engineering for consulting: hypothesis trees, MECE structures, executive summaries, storyline construction
- Using AI to read and synthesise long inputs — annual reports, 10-Ks, earnings transcripts, expert interview notes, industry reports
Module 2: Automating the Invisible Workload
- Auto-generating first-draft slide storylines from a problem statement and a hypothesis set
- AI-drafted expert call write-ups, client follow-up emails, and internal status updates
- Building a personal AI assistant that understands your engagement context, your firm’s slide style, and your partner’s tone
Module 3: Advance AI Skill for Strategic Leverage
- AI-assisted competitor benchmarking, market sizing, and value chain mapping at engagement speed
- Building first-cut financial model commentary and scenario narratives from raw outputs
- Using AI to clean and structure messy data — survey exports, web scrapes, secondary research — before it ever hits a deck
Module 4: Career Positioning for the AI Era
- How to position yourself as a modern, AI-fluent consultant for Engagement Manager, Director, and Partner-track roles
- Updating your professional profile to reflect advanced AI competency and measurable engagement impact
- Applying for roles at boutique firms, in-house strategy teams, PE operating partner roles, and AI-native consultancies — areas actively hunting for AI-literate consultants
Module 5: Live Mentorship and Personalised Roadmap
- Function-specific Q&A — I brought an actual live engagement workplan and rebuilt three workstreams’ workflows live
- A 30-day implementation plan mapped to a typical 8-week engagement cycle
- Access to the be10x community — 5 lakh+ professionals including consultants, strategy leads, and ex-consulting industry leaders
Every module produced a workflow I deployed on a live engagement the very next day. This wasn’t learning about AI. This was engineering AI into the way I consult.
04. 90 Days Inside the Program — What Changed on My Engagements
Days 1–30: Killing the Grunt Work
My desk research phase — the part of every new engagement that used to consume the first two weeks — was reduced to four days. I built a prompt structure where I feed the AI a problem statement, a list of target companies, and a hypothesis set, and it produces structured competitor profiles, value chain summaries, and a first-cut market sizing approach. I review, validate, and build on top of it.
I automated my slide first drafts. Instead of staring at a blank PowerPoint at 11 PM, I now generate a first-cut storyline from the working hypothesis — slide titles, key takeaways, the “so what” lines, and the supporting evidence structure. I review, restructure, and refine. My deck cycle compressed from 16 hours to under five.
Days 31–60: From Slide Producer to Strategist
This is where the program quietly changed how I work.
With the time I recovered, I started doing the work I had always wanted to but never had bandwidth for — real strategic thinking. I started bringing sharper second-level hypotheses to engagement reviews. I started pushing back on the partner’s storyline with structured counter-arguments instead of just executing what was assigned. I started spotting cross-engagement patterns and turning them into internal point-of-view documents.
My engagement manager noticed. For the first time in years, I was being pulled into client steerco discussions and proposal-writing — not just slide production.
Days 61–90: Career Doors Opening
I had never seriously applied for Engagement Manager roles at faster-moving firms. I assumed I needed one more strong engagement, or a specific industry vertical on my CV, or a B-school refresh. The be10x program’s career module pushed back hard on every one of those assumptions.
I updated my professional profile to highlight my advanced AI competency and the measurable impact I had delivered — desk research compressed by 70%, deck cycle time cut by two-thirds, three internal point-of-view documents authored in 60 days.
Within five weeks, I had three recruiter conversations. One was for an Engagement Manager role at a boutique strategy firm. Another was for a Strategy Director role at a PE-backed portfolio company. The third was for a Senior Associate role at an AI-native consultancy. I am in advanced rounds with two of them.
I didn’t switch profession. I added a layer of leverage that put my profile in conversations I had been silently watching from outside.
05. The Transformation — Consulting Challenges and How AI Solved Them
Here is an honest account of what the be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program actually solved for me as a consultant.
Desk research used to swallow the first two weeks of every engagement. The work was structured but slow — pull annual reports, build competitor profiles, do market sizing, map the value chain. AI now produces structured first-cut research deliverables from a clear problem statement and target list, and I spend my time validating and building on top instead of starting from a blank page. Two weeks of work compressed into four days.
Slide production used to be the cost of doing consulting — the long evenings, the late nights, the 2 AM saves before a Monday readout. AI now drafts first-cut storylines, slide titles, key takeaways, and “so what” lines from the working hypothesis, and I restructure and refine instead of writing every line from scratch. The deck cycle that used to consume sixteen hours now takes under five.
Expert call write-ups used to be the silent task that piled up across an engagement — fifteen calls, fifteen unwritten summaries, all due before the next milestone. AI-drafted summaries from raw notes meant I could turn around an expert call write-up in fifteen minutes instead of an hour, with better consistency in structure.
Financial model commentary used to be the part of every engagement I avoided until the night before the readout. AI accelerated the narrative-building from raw model outputs enough that scenario commentary became a 30-minute task rather than an evening’s work.
Cleaning messy data — survey exports, web scrapes, secondary research dumps — used to be the silent killer of every research-heavy engagement. AI now structures and validates raw data upstream, which means fewer surprises downstream and faster move-to-insight.
Client follow-up emails and internal status updates used to be the work I left to the end of every day, when I was too tired to write them properly. AI-drafted, tone-controlled communications became a 10-minute task instead of an hour of decision fatigue.
And the career stagnation I had quietly accepted as the natural plateau of a senior consultant — the “one more engagement and then I’ll push” loop — turned out to be entirely solvable. An AI-ready professional profile, the program’s certification, and a clear story of measurable impact translated into Engagement Manager and Director interviews within five weeks of finishing the program.
06. Value for Money — A Consultant’s Honest Take
Consultants are paid to scrutinise ROI. So let me be direct about the numbers on this program.
What makes this genuinely worth it for consulting professionals:
- The program is live and interactive — your questions are answered in real time, with consulting-specific context
- The output is immediate — every session produces a workflow, prompt library, or template you can deploy on a live engagement the next day
- The tools learned are free or low-cost — ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot are accessible to any working consultant
- The career module has direct monetary value — Engagement Manager, Director, and in-house strategy roles typically sit one to two pay bands above where most senior consultants plateau
- The time recovered — I estimate 12–18 hours per week during heavy engagements — is worth more than the program fee on any rational hourly calculation
Compared to alternatives:
- Executive MBA or part-time business school programs: valuable for credentials, but expensive, multi-year, and slow to ROI on day-to-day execution
- Strategy frameworks and industry certifications: useful for fundamentals, but rarely change how you actually ship a deck on a live engagement
- Self-taught AI via YouTube: free but unstructured, and most content assumes either a tech background or a beginner knowledge worker
- be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program: structured, practitioner-led, immediately applicable, and professionally credentialed
The question isn’t whether a consultant can afford this program. The question is whether a consultant in 2025 can afford to keep delivering engagements the way consultants delivered them in 2020 — while younger associates and AI-native firms compete on speed and leverage.
07. Who Among Consultants Will Benefit Most
This program is the right fit for you if you are:
- A management consultant or strategy consultant with 3+ years of experience who feels stuck below the Engagement Manager level
- A senior associate or principal at a Big 4 strategy practice, boutique strategy firm, or in-house consulting team
- An internal strategy professional at a corporate or PE portfolio company
- A consultant preparing for an Engagement Manager, Director, or Partner-track move
- A consulting professional considering a move in-house — to a Chief of Staff, VP Strategy, or Head of BizOps role
This may not be the right fit if:
- You are in your first year of consulting and still building foundational problem-structuring skills
- You operate at a firm with strict bans on external AI tools and no internal alternatives
- You are looking for a deep-dive technical course on a specific tool like Alteryx, Tableau, or a particular modelling stack
08. Should Every Consultant Do This?
I have been in consulting for nine years. I have done internal training modules, industry deep-dives, modelling bootcamps, and storyline workshops. Most of them gave me frameworks. None of them changed the way my Monday actually looked.
The be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program is the first program where I walked out of every session and rebuilt a piece of my engagement workflow the next morning. Not eventually. Not someday. Immediately.
Consulting is changing faster than most consultants want to admit. The firms still winning in five years will be the ones whose teams moved beyond manual desk research and slide production and into AI-augmented engagement delivery. The consultants who get there first will be the ones who built advanced AI skill into their own working stack — while the rest are still treating AI as a junior associate they don’t trust.
That is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to move now.
If you are a consultant who cares about the quality of your work, the sustainability of your hours, and the seniority of the rooms you sit in — this program is built for you.
The be10x Advanced AI Careers Accelerator Program is designed for professionals who want to lead — not just survive — in the AI era. Consultants and strategy professionals included. Visit be10x.in to find out when the next session opens.
