US Consultancy Ditches Slide Decks, Builds AI Apps for Clients in 60 Minutes

Mid-sized Chicago consultancy West Monroe is abandoning its old habit of preparing slide decks for first meetings with clients. Since January, the firm, which has about 2,000 employees, has been building custom AI-based applications instead of presentations, and has brought them to roughly a third of its initial client conversations.

The move targets two long-standing weaknesses in the consulting industry: polished presentations that fail to help clients picture a real solution, and pilot projects that take weeks just to get budget approval. West Monroe wants to compress those two stages—presentation and trial—into a single step: a product that already runs.

Bret Greenstein, West Monroe's Chief AI Officer, argues slide decks never truly move clients. "No one has ever been inspired or awakened by PowerPoint," he told Business Insider. "But most consulting work just produces PowerPoint to convince people."

As an illustration, for a telecom client looking to improve its supply chain, West Monroe first used AI to gather public information about suppliers, business priorities, and the client's technology stack. The firm's supply chain expertise was then used to design an agent-based system. Instead of explaining the concept in a meeting, they built a prototype with the client's branding and synthetic data resembling real operations. The client liked it but asked to see hardware, software, and services integration all at once. The application was then modified mid-meeting.

Greenstein stresses the demo is not the final product. Clients still need integration, data structuring, process changes, and change management before the software can be used day to day. However, AI speeds up the creation of the initial version. West Monroe uses various public tools such as ChatGPT Work and Codex, Claude Code, Google AI Studio, and Antigravity. Before the app-first approach, building something like that took about eight weeks; now a first demo version can be ready in about an hour.

The firm also has an internal app store containing more than 700 applications and templates from client work. Those examples have been reused 30 to 40 times with gradual adjustments to new clients' systems and data. For West Monroe, this shifts the focus of discussion: from the question of whether the firm can build AI tools to whether the client has the right data, how employees will use it, and what needs to change for the technology to work.

"Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes. I don't think anyone really cares about AI just because it's AI," Greenstein said.

The shift reflects a broader trend in the professional services industry. For years, consultants have been seen as expensive because their main output is documents, not measurable solutions. The arrival of generative AI enables rapid prototyping, but it also raises client expectations: they want to see proof of work, not promises. Firms unable to adapt risk being displaced by more agile competitors or even by clients' own internal teams, which can now assemble simple applications.

In Indonesia, a similar model could be adopted by consulting firms, system integrators, and digital transformation units at large companies. Some local consultants have begun using AI to speed up analysis and prototyping, especially in banking, telecommunications, and manufacturing. However, the app-first approach demands data readiness that is often lacking, strict privacy governance, and experts capable of translating business needs into prototypes. Without that, demos will be mere displays, not solutions.

Going forward, the question is no longer whether consultants will use AI, but how quickly they can change the way they work. If one-hour prototypes become the norm, clients will demand real results from the first meeting. Can consulting firms in Indonesia adapt before this wave reaches their desks?