Industry · Consulting
Model the full AI operating cost of a modern consulting firm — per consultant, per engagement, per practice.
Strategy and management consulting firms run on synthesis, slide drafting, and client-ready deliverables. Generative AI is now embedded in every step — from research to storylining to QA — and token consumption per consultant is growing 3–5x year over year. This calculator estimates the realistic annual OpEx for an AI-enabled consulting workforce.
Tokens per consultant / yr
18–55M
Base to Heavy adoption
Annual cost / consultant
$120–$1,400
GPT-5 / Claude Sonnet 4 blend
RAG knowledge baseline
2.4M tokens
Per active user, per year
Input / output split
85% / 15%
Context-heavy workflows
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Embedded in core workflows. Mixed adoption.
AI-assisted tasks
4 / 4Annual estimate
$61.0K
Total token OpEx for 250 employees · Claude Sonnet 4
Key cost considerations for consulting
- Consultants are context-heavy: 80–90% of tokens are input (long briefs, transcripts, prior decks).
- Partner-level usage is lower in volume but uses frontier models, doubling the per-interaction cost.
- Knowledge-management RAG indexing is a fixed annual baseline regardless of activity peaks.
- Peak token-per-second load occurs during pitch weeks — size infrastructure for 3–5x the average.
Primary AI workloads in this industry
- AI research and synthesis cost calculator — 10K – 100K tokens / event, $0.10 – $2.00 per report.
- AI slide and deck drafting cost — 8K – 40K tokens / event, $0.10 – $0.80 per deck.
- AI client preparation cost calculator — 10K – 50K tokens / event, $0.15 – $1.00 per brief.
- RAG cost estimator — 5K – 50K tokens / event, $0.01 – $0.20 per query.
Frequently asked questions
›How many tokens does a typical consultant use per year?
Under base adoption, a manager-level consultant generates around 18–25M tokens per year. Heavy AI-native users with agentic workflows can exceed 80M tokens, driven by long-context research and slide generation.
›What is the AI cost per consultant per year?
At list pricing on Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-5, a base-adoption consultant costs $120–$350 per year in raw inference. Frontier-model heavy users (Opus, GPT-5) reach $900–$1,400 per year.
›Should consulting firms use frontier or balanced models?
Most synthesis, drafting, and Excel tasks are well-served by balanced models (Sonnet 4, GPT-5 mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro). Reserve frontier models for partner-level review and complex storylining where output quality drives realized fees.
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