Deploy AI to Reach for the Stars Not Churn Out Ready Meals 

The five course tasting menu at Gymkhana, London’s two Michelin star Indian restaurant, will set you back £145, which is the same ballpark cost as one hour’s consultancy at a top PR agency. If you paid that for dinner and were served up a chicken tikka ready meal you’d be very disappointed.

We’ve all seen the uncompromising focus on the finest ingredients and tweezer-level attention to detail of top restaurants from TV shows like The Bear.  

If we are going to charge Michelin star fees for our time, we must strive for Michelin star levels of campaign input and output. Not mass-produced PR ready meals. 

Herein lies the challenge with AI, because in the wrong hands it can churn out PR-ready meals in seconds. This doesn’t mean we stand still. The best kitchens in the world harness the best tools. These tools might save chefs time, but more importantly they help enhance the product and experience for customers. They are a means to an end.  

Chefs also continuously strive to access the finest ingredients. It is with these expectations that we have given all our employees business subscriptions to ChatGPT so that they can enhance the experience of our clients and strive for even higher standards of work we deliver.  

We consider AI to be another tool to be deployed to improve our consultancy to clients. An immensely powerful tool, but a tool, nonetheless.  

My concern with AI is that sometimes it can be easy to conflate efficiency with quality, and while they can be mutually reinforcing, one doesn’t guarantee the other. 

With a focus only on efficiency, AI can be used to produce passable written content in various formats in seconds. If you have basic communication needs, akin to a quick calorie fix, this is ok. But if you are striving for exceptional unique communications, this application of AI only taps into one small element of what it can deliver.

Like a microwave in a kitchen, AI can ‘do the job’ quickly, but the result is often clumsy, poor quality and missing the vital human element that clients value.

The real opportunity lies with combining the efficiency benefits of AI with quality, ambition and conscientiousness. Taken together, this technology and these powerful human traits can take the quality of our input and our output to Michelin star levels. I stress input, because just as ingredients shape the quality of food we can get onto a plate, so do the ingredients we put into our work.

So how do we ensure our teams are using AI as a tool to enhance quality?

First, there needs to be a culture of conscientiousness and transparency.  

Personally, AI helps me to apply so much more rigour to the work I do. I might still spend a similar level of time on individual projects, but I will have been able to cover so much more ground than I would without it.  

I am able to rapidly find data. When I have that data I can interrogate and query vast amounts of it to draw insights. And, when I eventually arrive at a hypothesis, I can test and challenge the assumptions rather than rely on gut feel.  

AI allows me to compress a week’s worth of work into less than a day. It means the quality of the inputs into my work are superior, leading to better outputs.   

All this means my clients get much more value for money. A conscientious person striving for continuous improvement will get the most from AI and deliver much more value to clients.

Second, there needs to be a culture of transparency. We need the equivalent of the bright lights of the kitchen, and the scrutiny of the “top chefs” in our firms, to ensure anything that is being shipped to clients is of the required standards.   

In an AI-enabled world we need even more transparency so that we can guide and coach the next generation of consultants and hold each other to account for the high standards we set ourselves. Challenging each other on the inputs and outputs to deliver more value and quality to clients.

An ambitious AI-enabled team, with a culture of transparency and conscientiousness at its core, will take us to new heights, and help us to truly reach for the stars.