I think about Kodak a lot when I think about what AI is doing to administrative and consulting work. Not because I think we are all about to disappear, but because the Kodak story is not really about technology. It is about what happens when you love your current product more than your future customer.

So the question I keep coming back to is not "will AI replace consultants?" The more honest question is: which version of you will AI replace?

The work that is already going

Let me be direct about this, because sugarcoating it does not help anyone.

Report drafting. Meeting minutes. Policy formatting. Template design. Basic data cleaning. Grant writing first drafts. These are things that AI can already do at a competent level, and it will do them faster and cheaper every year. If your entire value proposition as a consultant sits inside that list, the next five years will be uncomfortable.

This is not speculation. The tools are already here. A client who spent KES 15,000 on a report that took you three days can now get a passable first draft in twenty minutes. They still need you to review it, yes. But how long before they are not sure they need you for that part either?

The work that is going is the work that was always, if we are being honest, the lower end of what we do.

What does not go

When Excel arrived, it did not eliminate accountants. It eliminated accountants who refused to learn it, and it made the ones who mastered it enormously more productive. The people who treated Excel as a threat spent the nineties anxious. The people who treated it as a tool spent the nineties billing more.

The same thing is happening now, just faster and with higher stakes.

What AI cannot replace is not technical. It is relational and structural. It is the things that require you to have actually been in the room.

What stays irreplaceable

  • Reading institutional politics that no brief captures fully
  • Accountability when something goes wrong, a person who owns it
  • Judgment built from seeing ten versions of the same problem break in different ways
  • Designing systems for how people actually behave, not how they are supposed to
  • Trust that a client extends to a person, not a tool

These are not soft skills. They are the hardest skills. They just do not show up on a CV in ways we have learned to value.

The Excel position

Microsoft Excel should not still be the global standard for structured thinking in 2025. There are more powerful tools. More flexible tools. Tools with better visualisations, better collaboration features, better everything by the numbers.

And yet.

Every hospital, every NGO, every university finance department, every government procurement office runs on Excel. It is irreplaceable not because it is technically superior but because it embedded itself into how people reason about problems. It became a language. The people who speak that language fluently are translators between raw complexity and human decisions, and that role does not disappear when the tools evolve.

That is the position consultants need to occupy.

Not "I do these tasks well." That is a Kodak position. The task is the film.

The Excel position is: I am the person who understands the problem, knows the landscape, can work with whatever tools exist, and can translate between technical outputs and human judgment.

That role gets more valuable as the tools get more powerful, not less, because the gap between what AI can produce and what an organisation can actually absorb and use keeps widening. Someone has to stand in that gap.

What this means practically

Five moves that compound over a decade

  • Move up the abstraction ladder. Governance framework design beats minute writing every time.
  • Learn the tools before you need to. AI fluency is the new baseline, not a differentiator.
  • Build intellectual property that compounds. A published methodology outlasts any single contract.
  • Go narrow and deep. A specific reputation is harder to replace than a broad one.
  • Stay in the relationship layer. The contracts worth real money are still signed by humans who trust humans.
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The honest version

Ten years from now, a significant portion of what consultants currently bill for will be automated, commoditised, or priced so low it is not worth competing for. That is just true.

But the consultants who are building the right things now, technical fluency, deep niche expertise, intellectual property, genuine relationships, the ability to sit with complexity and help organisations make decisions they are not sure about, those people will be more valuable in ten years, not less. Because the AI will produce more output than ever, and someone still has to decide what to do with it.

Be the person who decides.

Do not love your current product more than your future client. Kodak loved film. Excel became the language.

Choose which one you are building toward.