- Perceptis has raised $3.6 million to automate tedious consulting tasks with generative AI.
- The startup was founded by a former McKinsey consultant and former Apple engineer.
- The cofounders said AI could lead to a lot of growth for small- and midsize consultancies.
Consulting has long relied on manpower, but a new generative AI startup co-founded by a former McKinsey consultant says its software can take over some of the industry’s most tedious tasks.
“A lot of the internal processes are extremely manual labor heavy,” Alibek Dostiyarov, cofounder and CEO of Perceptis, told Business Insider of consulting workflows, which he said “lend themselves almost perfectly to what GenAI is capable of doing.”
He co-founded Perceptis with CTO Yersultan Sapar, a former engineer at Apple, to help consulting and professional services firms automate monotonous tasks, freeing up people at those firms to serve more clients and focus on solving their problems.
“Perceptis is an operating system for the consultants designed to help them win more business and make consulting — their day job — even more enjoyable and focused on the core of their service,” Sapar said.
Perceptis has raised $3.6 million in funding led by Streamlined Ventures, along with The House Fund, Tekton Ventures, FEBE Ventures, MOST Ventures, and Silkroad Innovation Hub. They’ve also gained some prominent angel investors, including Charlie Songhurst, a member of Meta’s board of directors and former Microsoft executive; AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of Everlaw, and Peter Kazanjy, author of “Founding Sales” and co-founder of Atrium.
Advancements in generative AI have disrupted the broader consulting industry, with major firms making huge investments in the technology and establishing dedicated AI units, such as McKinsey’s QuantumBlack. A senior partner at McKinsey told BI last year that he thinks AI is “going to be most of what we do in the future.”
How AI helps consultants land jobs
Perceptis is currently focused on the business development side of consulting, or helping firms secure jobs. The AI can do industry research for companies that Perceptis clients are interested in, identify what opportunities there are, and match that up with the clients’ specific skills and backgrounds. It then creates a detailed, custom proposal that the client can use to try and secure a job.
Dostiyarov said an average proposal, meaning the work put in before the consulting firm is even hired for a job, can take 20 hours of work or more, adding that with AI it can take a fraction of the time.
Dostiyarov used an analogy for their message to clients: “We are going to find the house on fire for you, and then we are going to help you show up as the perfect firefighter for the job by giving you the perfect proposal.”
“Because of all the data and all the capabilities that we have with our AI, we now can tell a perfect story as to why you are the great company to solve this problem,” he said.
The co-founders said Perceptis clients are often able to double or triple the number of proposals they send each month and experience higher conversation rates as well as increases in revenue soon after getting started with the program.
Perceptis primarily serves small- to medium-sized firms, which typically don’t have the same manpower as the biggest firms nor do they build their own internal AI tools.
The startup saw its biggest growth yet in November and December, doubling its annual recurring revenue, the cofounders said.
AI can’t replace human consultants
The Perceptis co-founders said they see AI as supplementing human consultants, not replacing them, and that the technology still has its limitations. They said AI can’t replace human judgement, at least for now, or the human-to-human interaction that is needed in consulting.
But they think it could make the industry overall a lot more productive. AI could also potentially help smaller consultancies and even independent consultants compete more seriously in the space by taking over the tedious but necessary work that the bigger firms have more than enough employees to handle.
“Perceptis therefore democratizes access to consulting as an industry,” Dostiyarov said.
As a result, they said the consulting industry could become a lot larger, more fragmented, and more specialized — and that the MBBs and Big Fours of the world could become a bit less dominant.
“There are, of course, the goliaths in the industry. We don’t think that they’re going to go away,” Dostiyarov said. “Still, we think that the majority of the growth is actually going to come from these much smaller firms.”
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