When a client calls the mid-market consulting firm West Monroe to discuss supply chain efficiency, it doesn’t start by preparing a slide deck for the first meeting. Instead, it builds a customized app using AI to start the conversation.
“No one’s ever been inspired or moved or woken up excited about a PowerPoint,” Bret Greenstein, West Monroe’s chief AI officer, told Business Insider. “And yet so much of consulting is to produce a PowerPoint to compel or convince or persuade somebody.”
Founded in Chicago in 2002, West Monroe has about 2,000 employees. Since adopting its app-first approach in January, the firm has brought a working demo or app to about a third of first client conversations.
The firm builds the apps to give clients a concrete look at how AI could change their work. Greenstein said the approach addresses two familiar problems: Consulting firms can spend too long polishing PowerPoint presentations without helping clients visualize what comes next, while pilot projects can take weeks to fund and build without leading anywhere. The aim is to collapse the traditional deck and proof of concept into a single step: a working product.
For a telecommunications company seeking help with its supply chain, West Monroe first used AI to find publicly available information about its suppliers, business priorities, and technology stack. It then applied its own supply chain expertise to envision how an agent-powered system could work.
Instead of simply describing that concept in the first meeting, the firm built a prototype tailored to the client. The app used the client’s branding and synthetic data designed to reflect its operations. The idea is to make the proposal feel tangible, like sitting in a car at a dealership and picturing yourself owning it, Greenstein said.
The client liked it but wanted to see hardware, software, and services together. West Monroe changed the app during the meeting.
The demos are not final products. Greenstein said a client still needs integration, data work, process changes, and change management before it can use the software in its business.
AI has made it faster to build an early version. Greenstein said that the firm uses a variety of public AI tools like ChatGPT Work and Codex, Claude Code, Google AI Studio, and Antigravity, among others. Before they adopted an app-forward approach, he said it would take about eight weeks to build something like this. Now the team can create the first demo version in roughly an hour.
West Monroe has an internal app store with more than 700 apps and templates based on client work. The firm has been able to reuse examples 30 or 40 times, Greenstein said, adjusting them incrementally for a new client’s systems and data.
The approach helps move client conversations beyond the question of whether the firm can build an AI tool. Right off the bat, they can discuss whether the company has the right data, how workers will use the technology, and what may need to change for it to work.
“Outcomes, outcomes, outcomes,” Greenstein said. “I don’t think anyone really cares about AI for the sake of AI.”
Read the full article here
