Inside the AI startups reinventing consulting: 'It's not as good as McKinsey, but it's instant' (www.businessinsider.com)

A new wave of "consultancy tech" startups is using foundation models to automate market research, data analysis, operations and even parts of strategy work — effectively offering instant, lower-cost versions of traditional consulting. Companies such as PromptQL (from Hasura), Parable, Profound, Dialogue AI and Xavier AI have raised recent funding rounds (Parable $16.6M, Profound $20M, Dialogue AI $6M) and position their products as AI analysts that integrate clients’ internal data with large language and multimodal models to continuously learn, adapt, and surface actionable insights. PromptQL highlights a “killer feature” of providing accuracy at scale without heavy data prep and pairs automated tools with on-demand engineering support (priced at ~$900/hour). For the AI/ML community this signals both a technical and market shift: startups are proving specialized, production-grade integrations of foundation models into business workflows (call centers, AP/AR, market research, executive coaching and implementation services), expanding opportunities beyond Fortune 500s to mid-market firms that can’t afford Big Four retainers. The model trade-offs are clear — speed and accessibility versus the broader strategic depth a top consulting firm supplies — but these platforms also raise important technical implications around data ingestion, continual learning, model reliability, human-in-the-loop governance and deployment at scale. Overall, the trend accelerates productized AI consulting and creates fertile ground for engineering, evaluation, and tooling innovations.