A) Forming cross company cliques (a lot of C suite is ex consultant and they scratch each others' backs).
B) ego stroking and typical sales ("this executive is a visionary who must be furnished with top quality steak and strippers")
C) Letting you know on the sly what their other customers are doing that seems to be working.
D) Providing industrial grade ass cover for decisions that the C suite want to make but are afraid to make by themselves (like layoffs).
It's probably easier to assume that their job is to provide objective expert advice since thats what they say they do.
I'm being realistic here, not cynical.
I can assure you I wasn't.
You are mistaken "expertise" with fashion and a good voice.
I recon 60% of management consulting work is just to ass cover for a director with no conviction
I don't doubt that if the high level decision agreed upon is "more layoffs because AI" and they were asked for a 60 page report to justify it that ChatGPT would help inordinately in fleshing it out with something that sounds fairly plausible.
“I paid a world-class consulting consultant company top dollar to vet this idea and they produced ton of documents about how great it was. And, yet it failed. But, I’m not at fault here. What more would you have had me do?”
There was an article on HN years ago about top grade from Harvard-like schools being sucked into consulting companies and discovering their job was to be paid tons of money writing reports that support whatever the exec of the moment wanted to hear.
Sounds like an extremely nice job.