Sharing innovations in our regular AI forum

This November, we once again brought our independent and in-house consultants together to discuss the latest developments in Eden McCallum’s use of AI and to share inspiring and insightful use cases from our project work.

This session opened with a look at the developing penetration and uses of AI within the firm and the profession more broadly. This included the traditional firms’ expected transition from ‘pyramid’ to ‘obelisk’, as characterised in HBR, and the shifts in usage from basic LLMs to workflow tools and now to partly ‘autonomous’ agents.

We explored four use cases. First, marketing-focused consultant Fenella McVey described learnings from her extensive and ever-developing use of a cadre of AI assistants to streamline and enhance different aspects of her work, demonstrating highly effective specific instances from brief to output, with templates.

Our senior in-house consultant Noah van Roekel walked us through his recent experience working with AI to solve a specific data visualization challenge for a client, which included using dummy data to develop a successful approach, and then gaining support in coding to create a tool to be used securely with real client data.

Independent commercial effectiveness consultant Jonathan van Spijker Baan described the process of building back a half-remembered chart to demonstrate the potential of an approach to customer behavioural clustering in a client pitch; this involved coaching ChatGPT to visualise the remembered pieces and populate the missing elements using plausible synthetic data.

Finally, Jonathan shared a second, striking case of using GenAI as a creative tool to identify and develop a memorable and helpful analogy to support a go-to-market team in taking a structured approach to a common client interaction.

Our huge thanks to Fenella, Noah and Jonathan for their hugely illuminating insights and stories. We are looking forward to hearing more requests for cases to discuss at the next session and ask everyone to please keep them coming.