A US management consulting firm with 140 staff and about $32M in revenue found its consultants spending around a third of their time on work that was not consulting.
01The problem
Each quarter the firm spent about 320 hours writing proposals, 280 hours looking for past work and 240 hours formatting deliverables. Eight years of files, 47,000 of them, sat in SharePoint with no naming system and no search beyond file names.
Time was logged from memory, so 15–20% of billable time was never recorded.
02What was built
A private knowledge base was built from the firm’s 12,000 most useful documents, with access controls and source-linked answers in Slack. A proposal assistant turns short briefs into drafts using past proposals. A time-entry assistant suggests daily entries for approval, while report and slide tools handle structure and formatting. Monthly partner reporting was also automated.
Work started with a two-week assessment, followed by three phases of development over six months. Consultants review proposal drafts, approve time entries and supply the analysis for reports and slides.
03How it works
- 01Ask the firm’s past work
Consultants ask questions in Slack and get answers in seconds, with links to the source documents.
- 02Draft the proposal
A short brief becomes a first draft built from past proposals, ready for review.
- 03Fill in the timesheet
The assistant suggests each day’s time entries from calendar, email and documents, approved with one tap.
- 04Format the deliverable
Report and slide tools handle structure and formatting, while consultants supply the analysis.
04What changed
In the first full quarter, more than 1,000 consultant hours were recovered. Proposals take about 45 minutes of review instead of 4–8 hours, cutting proposal work from about 320 hours a quarter to 60, and the share of billable time captured rose from 80–85% to 94%.
The managing partner estimates $380,000 a year in extra billings from better time capture.
“The AI systems Gigabit built didn’t replace a single consultant.”
Managing Partner (unnamed)
What this could look like for your clients
Professional services firms, including many of your clients, lose hours to proposals, searching old files and unlogged time. A similar system could turn that time back into billable work.