A wave of excitement and activity around AI is hitting management consulting, and many leaders are asking the same questions. What is this AI thing? What do I do with it? And what does it really mean for my business? In this episode, host Daniel Kazani talks with Matthew Murphy, a partner at AMEND Consulting in Cincinnati, about how technology and AI now sit at the forefront of almost every new client conversation.

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They explore why AI discussions often uncover missing fundamentals in process, technology, and data management, and why the biggest wins today show up in highly manual, tedious, document-intensive, and task-intensive work. From order entry and AR and AP automation to image recognition in retail stores and AI-supported assessments in consulting, they share concrete examples of AI agents working in a human-in-the-loop way. The conversation then moves to augmentation versus role replacement, departments that cannot fill roles, the new workforce entering the market, and how AI is reshaping the core business model of professional services and long-term client relationships.

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👤 Guest Bio

Matthew Murphy is a partner at AMEND Consulting, a management consulting firm based in Cincinnati. He has spent over a decade driving transformation for mid-market and large enterprises, working across people, process, and metrics. He also ran and led a software business at AMEND for four years. Now he helps clients in the age of AI and automation, helping them leverage technology and grow smarter across operations, analytics, and automation.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why technology and AI are at the forefront of almost every conversation with new or existing clients, from enthusiasm to the fear of falling behind
• How AI projects often start with automating a particular process, but lead to missing foundations in process, technology, and data management
• Real-world automation in order entry, where customer service and inside sales teams spend most of the day keying in orders, and AI agents can now do a bulk of the work
• Accounting and finance use cases like AR and AP automation, financial close, and reconciliation, and how broad workflow and AI automation tools can be applied across many process areas
• Image recognition in retail, where store audits used to mean hundreds of pictures per store and manual review, and an AI agent now sifts through images with a high degree of accuracy and improves the quality of life for the team
• How AMEND assessments have changed from heavy note-taking and weeks of brute force compilation to AI agents that process notes, meeting recordings, and GoPro footage and produce first-pass gap and theme compilations in hours or days
• AI as a way to capture and expose tribal knowledge from hundreds or thousands of work instructions, helping a newer workforce get up to speed more quickly, instead of hunting through file repositories or an LMS
• The reality of augmentation versus role replacement, from overworked teams doing two people’s worth of work to departments that choose not to fill open roles because AI enables the same team to do more
• Why AMEND is raising the watermark for technical competency for new hires, partnering with universities, and still investing in junior talent even as some larger firms cut hiring targets
• How AI challenges the traditional dollars for hours model in professional services, pushes firms toward value-based pricing, and increases the importance of being a trusted advisor focused on long-term relationships and business impact

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• AMEND Consulting
• RPA tools for process automation
• AI agents for workflow and document-intensive tasks
• LMS and file repositories as traditional knowledge bases
• GoPros for process shadowing and manufacturing floor observations
• Nvidia is an example of developers experimenting with new tools every day