Six Degrees Think Tank, A New Paradigm for the Consulting Industry Empowered by AI
Every advancement in technology is quietly reshaping the landscape of the business world, and the consulting industry is no exception.
The history of management consulting can be traced back to the Second Industrial Revolution. Technological leaps and specialized division of labor gave birth to the rudimentary form of this industry. In the Third Industrial Revolution, the popularization of information technology accelerated the rise of the consulting industry. From improving enterprise efficiency to solving complex business problems, consulting advisors were once the core think tanks of corporate strategies. Nowadays, as the recognized "new wave", the rise of generative AI is reshaping this industry at an unprecedented speed.
A white paper from the Harvard Business Review shows that in an internal survey by KPMG, 60% of employees said that the generative AI assistant enables them to devote more time to valuable work; another startup from the United States, by using ChatGPT to generate personalized business proposals and marketing materials, achieved an 80% business growth in just four months.
The capabilities of AI are not limited to simple data analysis but can also delve into the core areas of consulting such as generating strategic insights and optimizing the decision-making process. This also requires consulting agencies to no longer be limited to services in a single field but to transform into a more versatile and comprehensive business model.
How should the consulting industry ride the tide of this new revolution? Liudu Zhinang (Six Degrees Think Tank) is undoubtedly a model worth noting. Since its establishment in 2018, Liudu Zhinang has been the first in the industry to introduce artificial intelligence technology. From expert matching to talent hunting and now to strategic insight services, Liudu Zhinang has enabled various business segments with AI, initiating the process of conglomeration.
From a Single Business to Conglomeration: How Does Liudu Zhinang Break Through?
The origin of the company name "Liudu Zhinang" is the well-known Six Degrees of Separation theory, which states that through a chain of no more than six people, you can get to know anyone in the world. In the field of business information, many enterprises also hope to use the six degrees of separation network to find experts in the field and use their professional knowledge to help enterprises make more informed decisions.
Li Shengxiang, the CEO of Liudu Zhinang, said that in the past six years since its establishment, starting from the expert business, Liudu has independently incubated various business segments, operating independently. Conglomeration helps to integrate the business resources and data of each segment, better apply AI and digitalization, improve quality and efficiency, and also provide customers with more efficient and high-quality service options.
In the past, the expert matching process in the consulting industry relied highly on manual operations. From communicating customer needs to screening the expert database to the final matching confirmation, this process often takes several days or even weeks. However, through big data analysis and intelligent algorithms, Liudu Zhinang can complete the screening and matching of massive resources in a short period of time. When the company was established in 2018, Liudu Zhinang saved 80% of manpower and 75% of time through this technology, enabling the entire expert matching process to be completed within 30 minutes to 1 hour, thus becoming a "catfish" that stirs the industry in the AI era.
Specifically, after receiving customer needs, the project manager can quickly understand the customer's needs through AI's semantic analysis, search in Liudu Zhinang's global expert database of more than 1.5 million, and capture information in dimensions including job history, industry expertise, and cooperation evaluation. Then, manual docking is introduced later. This process has increased the information acquisition efficiency by more than 30%. In this process, Liudu Zhinang also built its own AI compliance review system, setting different permissions for different accounts in the expert database to achieve compliance protection of expert resumes; and when the project involves sensitive areas, confidentiality and other non-compliant content, the system will automatically trigger warnings, shielding, interruption and other signs.
After matching the appropriate experts for the customers, Liudu Zhinang found that customers are faced with another important problem, that is: How to extract key insights from a large amount of interview information? How can we help customers more efficiently locate the key information of one-on-one interviews instead of just giving a complete report of tens of thousands of words? This pain point also gave birth to Liudu Zhinang's self-developed AI question-answering system "Wendao Polarisix". Through natural language processing technology, it can analyze multi-source information such as meeting content, industry reports, and market data in real time and generate concise and clear insight summaries. Although publicly available large language models such as ChatGPT and Deepseek can also complete the extraction of complex information, they are prone to "AI hallucinations" and require manual secondary verification of information. The advantage of Liudu Zhinang's self-developed AI question-answering system is that all the data comes from industry experts, 36Kr analysts and the internal consulting team, which are trained through their first-hand interview information, and can better ensure the accuracy of the information.
If the Liudu Expert and Wendao Polarisix businesses help customers solve the problem of "quickly obtaining effective information", then the next proposition that Liudu Zhinang is going to tackle is to help customers "quickly match suitable talents". This is also a service scenario expanded based on the existing expert business. Because the expert business will come into contact with a large number of high-end and exclusive expert resources, and these experts are often potential candidates for enterprises. Relying on this network, Liudu Zhinang has spawned the headhunting business brand Talent Shop Partner (TSP). Different from the traditional headhunting business, Liudu Zhinang still introduces AI technology. The AI model of Talent Shop Partner has a deep understanding ability for job requirements, and can comprehensively analyze multi-dimensional data such as the career background, skill characteristics and development potential of candidates, and more accurately and efficiently match the needs of enterprises and talent resources.
It can be seen that since its establishment in 2018, "Liudu Zhinang" has been deeply using digital and intelligent technologies to continuously improve the operational efficiency and compliance effect of the project. However, the external environment is also changing quietly. The demand for consulting services from customers is gradually upgrading from "quickly obtaining information" to "solving complex problems", and even "solving problems on the ground", and more attention is paid to directly measurable results.
It is based on this demand change that in 2024, Liudu Zhinang jointly incubated "Yu Jian CVC" with several state-owned enterprises. Yu Jian CVC helps enterprises efficiently solve strategic problems through AI-driven data analysis and model building. Wang Haicheng, the CEO of Yu Jian Consulting, mentioned in an interview with 36Kr: "AI can greatly improve efficiency in the desk research stage. The advantage of Yu Jian Consulting lies in that we have a lot of accumulated meeting minutes and expert resources. They are not publicly available information outside, but internal non-consensus information. It can not only improve efficiency, but also is an irreplaceable and relatively scarce resource." The wisdom and knowledge of the expert brain, combined with artificial intelligence, together constitute the technical base of Yu Jian CVC. This is an important exploration in the field of AI-enabled strategic consulting, and also marks the entry of Liudu Zhinang into a new stage of conglomeration.
What is the Core Value of Consultants in the AI Era?
2024 is the first year of Liudu Zhinang's conglomeration, and looking back on its development process, AI has always been the core driving force for its business innovation. Li Shengxiang, the CEO of Liudu Zhinang, mentioned that Liudu Zhinang has realized since its establishment that AI and digitalization are the best paths and means for the transformation, quality improvement and efficiency increase of traditional enterprise services.
Whether it is the AI-driven expert matching system of "Liudu Expert", Liudu's self-developed AI question-answering system "Wendao Polarisix", or Yu Jian CVC through AI-driven data analysis and model building, behind these is actually a profound understanding of AI. After all, with the increasingly rapid evolution of AI, an undeniable voice is that AI will replace many of human's jobs, especially basic and repetitive ones.
But Wang Haicheng, the CEO of Yu Jian CVC, has the opposite view. "After the advent of AI, in fact, there are more things that consulting can do. They can free up more energy to do creative things, go deep into the front line of customers to do insight diagnosis, or help customers implement solutions."
The core value of the consulting industry is not limited to this. Consultants need to have an insight that goes beyond the client, be able to keenly capture industry trends and anticipate potential opportunities and risks. This ability not only depends on data, but also requires experience, intuition and a deep understanding of the business environment - these are areas that AI is still difficult to replace.
For example, in the consulting industry, some junior consultants are the most worried about the development of AI. After all, much of their time is spent on data collection, collation and basic analysis, and this seems to be the area where AI is currently the most proficient.
"There will definitely be a very big adjustment in the requirements for consulting advisors, but this adjustment is something we are very happy to see. Because everyone likes to recruit such highly educated or very excellent talents. When they are recruited, they should be allowed to do the most challenging and creative things. I think this is a very good trend." Wang Haicheng is happy to see this. The empowerment of AI has made the consulting industry shift from more "manual labor" to "mental labor", and from more "executive type" to "creative type". This is not only a remodeling of the consultant's ability, but also a profound transformation of the industry's value creation method.
AI + Senior Talents: The Future of the Consulting Industry
AI is an enabler of the consulting industry, not a replacement.
With the continuous development of AI technology, the competitive landscape of the consulting industry will also continue to evolve. Only those consulting agencies that can internalize AI capabilities and transform them into actual value can gain a greater advantage in the fierce market competition. For individual consulting advisors, the popularization of AI also means new challenges and opportunities. Only by continuously improving their own capabilities and embracing creative thinking can they stand out in this wave of change.
The conglomeration process of Liudu Zhinang is a microcosm of this trend. This constantly changing and innovative institution is continuously absorbing talents with multi-dimensional capabilities, and through AI + senior talents, it can better empower customers and provide enterprises with accurate and quick decisions. For practitioners who are determined to participate in the industry transformation, Liudu Zhinang not only provides a transformation sample, but also provides a practical sandbox for capability transition.