Doubly augmented: why AI makes experience more valuable, not less

One fear comes up in every conversation about AI and consulting: if the machine knows everything, what is experience worth? What we observe in the field is exactly the opposite. The more trivial access to knowledge becomes, the more judgement becomes the scarce factor.

What AI actually changes

AI radically shortens learning curves. A consultant now absorbs a business context, a regulatory framework or a sector’s history in a fraction of the time it used to take. The hours saved on gathering and synthesising don’t vanish. They are reinvested where humans make the difference: asking the right question, sensing what is stuck inside an organisation, deciding.

But the gain is not uniform. AI multiplies what is already there. Give the same tool to a junior profile and to an executive who has steered three transformations: the latter will get far more out of it, because they know what to ask, what to verify, and above all what to ignore.

What the research measures

The most serious research confirms this asymmetry, with a nuance worth knowing.

In a 2023 experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants, researchers from Harvard, Wharton and MIT found that AI delivers large gains on the tasks it handles well: 12.2% more tasks completed, 25.1% faster, at markedly higher quality. But on a complex task outside what AI can do, those using it were 19% less likely to reach the right answer. The researchers call this a “jagged frontier”: AI excels here and fails there, without warning. Knowing which side of the frontier you are on is exactly what experience provides.

The nuance comes from a study led by Erik Brynjolfsson with more than 5,000 customer support agents: AI raised productivity by 14% on average, and by 34% for the least experienced. On standardised tasks, the tool spreads the know-how of the best performers and narrows the gaps. It is on complex problems, the ones consulting engagements exist for, that judgement regains its full weight.

The most telling experiment comes from P&G: a professional working with AI matches the quality of an entire team working without it, in 16% less time (“Cybernetic Teammate” study, Harvard, Wharton and P&G, 2025).

The double multiplier

This is the conviction that shapes our network: the highest-performing consultants combine two multipliers.

The first is experience accumulated across multiple terrains: sectors, geographies, corporate cultures. It provides the library of lived situations that lets you recognise a problem in a new shape.

The second is daily mastery of AI, not as a sales pitch, but as a working copilot: forming hypotheses faster, testing them against the data, producing decision-ready deliverables in days rather than weeks.

Each multiplier is valuable on its own. Combined, they change the nature of the mission: time shifts from production to judgement.

What this changes for you

For an organisation mobilising consultants, the question is no longer “how many hands” but “what level of judgement, augmented by which tools”. A tight team of experienced, well-equipped profiles now delivers what used to require an army of juniors, faster, and with recommendations that hold up in the field.

AI doesn’t replace experience. It makes it decisive.

Sources

• Fabrizio Dell’Acqua et al., Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, Harvard Business School, 2023: papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4573321
• Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, Generative AI at Work, NBER, 2023: nber.org/papers/w31161
• Fabrizio Dell’Acqua et al., The Cybernetic Teammate, Harvard Business School, 2025.