The Augmented Strategist: A Five-Level Maturity Framework for Agentic AI in Management Consulting and Strategic Advice

Management consulting sells structured judgment: research, analysis, synthesis and recommendation, delivered under time pressure by teams organised as a pyramid of junior analysts and senior partners. Generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) now performs a growing share of the pyramid's base — desk research, data analysis, benchmarking, first-draft synthesis — and is beginning to perform parts of its middle, including option generation and scenario construction. This conceptual paper asks what happens to strategic advice when the technology moves from assisting consultants to acting alongside them. Drawing on the automation–augmentation paradox, research on the changing sources of competitive advantage in AI, and the dynamic capabilities tradition, we develop a five-level maturity framework for agentic AI in consulting and strategic advice: (1) Assisted, (2) Augmented Analysis, (3) Generative Partnership, (4) Agentic Workflows, and (5) Governed Autonomous Operations. For each level we specify the AI capabilities in use, the changing human role, the principal risks, and the governance required before a firm should advance to the next level. We then propose four governance principles for AI-augmented advice — named human accountability, an explicit decision-rights ladder, evidence and audit requirements, and a protected right to override — and derive three propositions for empirical research. The framework is addressed to consulting firm leaders redesigning their leverage model, to clients learning how to buy and challenge AI-augmented advice, and to business schools whose graduates will enter a profession whose entry-level tasks are being automated first.