Ask ChatGPT for a strategy deck and you will have one in ten minutes. Ask it whether that strategy actually fits your team, your culture, and your moment, and it has nothing. That gap is where AI consulting keeps running into a wall, and it is exactly what I talked about with Andrew Winton on the podcast this week.
Andrew has spent 25 years in senior marketing and growth roles at PepsiCo, Amazon Prime Video, Sky, The Times, EE, T-Mobile, and Kaspersky. He is now CMO at Digital Advisory, a platform that connects companies with senior independent advisors for high stakes decisions, and the creator of BOOM Marketing, a marketing education program built on Qosmos. He has spent his career inside the rooms where big decisions get made, and the last few years figuring out where AI consulting adds real value and where it does not.
What AI Consulting Still Cannot Replace
The classic pitch for management consulting was information asymmetry. McKinsey knew something you did not, and you paid for the gap. Andrew does not dispute that a big chunk of that information is now one prompt away. When I put that to him directly, he agreed without hesitation.
But he does not think that kills consulting. He thinks it kills the lazy version of it. “The lazy consulting firms, or the poor ones, will probably fall by the wayside,” he told me. “The really smart ones, like Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey, they’ll learn and they’ll evolve and they’ll use this technology to their advantage.”
What survives, in his view, is judgment. Data is not knowledge. It is just information you still have to do something with. The advisors who matter take that information and tell you which direction to move in, given your specific situation. AI can hand you a hundred frameworks in a minute. It cannot tell you which one fits your team, your internal politics, and your timeline. That is the real tension inside AI consulting right now: more raw material, same shortage of people who know what to do with it.
The Junior Pipeline Problem Nobody Is Pricing In
Here is the part of the conversation that stuck with me most. Entry level consulting work, the research and analysis junior consultants used to cut their teeth on, is exactly what AI does well. Hiring for junior analyst roles at major firms has already slowed.
Andrew connected a dot I had not fully made myself. Judgment is not something you are born with. Senior consultants get good at reading a room and making a hard call because they spent years doing the unglamorous research work first, watching how decisions actually played out. “If there is not so many people starting on that step by step career progression,” he said, “then at some point there is going to be a drop off of all these senior, experienced consultants.”
He does not think it is an emergency yet. He thinks it is a problem that shows up in fifteen to twenty years. But it is a real one. You cannot prompt your way to 25 years of pattern recognition. If firms stop training the people who would eventually build that pattern recognition, the supply of real judgment shrinks over time, even as the supply of AI consulting output keeps growing.
Only 2 Percent of Boards Understand Their Own AI Tools
This is the number from the conversation that should worry you if you sit on a board or report to one. Only 2 percent of board directors have meaningful AI expertise, and boards are making AI-related decisions, including AI consulting purchases, anyway.
Andrew called it “the Wild West.” Board members prompt ChatGPT or Claude on the fly, walk into the boardroom with the output, and treat it as due diligence. It is not. He told a story about a friend whose business partner asked AI to write her professional bio. The AI invented a book she had never written, complete with a title and a description. It was specific and convincing enough that she and her business partner eventually decided to write the book AI said she had already written.
That is a funny story until you swap “bio” for “market entry decision” or “acquisition target.” Andrew’s point: a one or two percent error in an AI-informed decision does not stay small inside a large organization. It compounds. “Inaccurate data layered on top of inaccurate data just gets worse and worse,” he said, comparing it to a version of the telephone game that runs across every AI citation for months.
How Digital Advisory Is Trying to Fix the Gap
This is where Andrew’s day job comes in. Digital Advisory is not a consulting firm, and it is not an expert marketplace either. It is Andrew’s answer to the AI consulting gap: an ecosystem of more than 350 executives, each with 20 to 25 years of experience, who advise companies on specific, time-sensitive decisions.
Governance is the operative word. Every client brief is anonymized. Every advisor is checked for conflicts of interest before they see it. The platform synthesizes advice from multiple advisors into a single report with no individual attribution, so no one person’s feedback can be cherry-picked or politicized. If a client wants to go deeper with a specific advisor afterward, they can, on a call, but the report itself stays aggregated.
The clearest use case Andrew described: a leader heading into a board meeting in a few weeks with a decision already half made, who wants outside validation before committing. Maybe it is a technology platform choice. Maybe it is a budget reallocation. You are not buying a six-month transformation program. You are buying a few days of senior judgment that either confirms your instinct or gives you a reason to change course before you are in the room.
If you want a structured way to check your own judgment before a big decision, our free productivity assessment is a good place to start. It maps your habits against the same four vectors covered below.
Why Andrew Left the Ladder for a Portfolio Career
Andrew did not leave big companies because he burned out. He left because he ran out of room to learn. Large organizations move slowly and operate inside tight political structures, he said. Startups and scale-ups offer pace instead, plus the freedom to apply everything he learned in corporate life, the processes and operational discipline small companies usually lack, without the baggage that comes with it.
Now he works with roughly six businesses a month. Each one teaches him something he brings to the next. “I’m learning more and more,” he said. “It’s my brain and it’s my energy.” That is not a euphemism for burnout avoidance. It is a genuine claim that variety, not stability, keeps his thinking sharp.
He is not alone. The 350-plus executives on Digital Advisory’s platform share a pattern, in his experience. They have hit a ceiling inside their own organization, they still have real expertise to offer, and they are a few years out from board or non-executive director roles. Advising through a platform like his is a low-risk way to build that reputation before they need it.
Andrew’s Actual Definition of Productivity
I asked Andrew directly about productivity, since that is the whole point of this podcast. He rejected the “do more of the same, faster” framing outright. His version: you have a fixed amount of time and energy every day, and your job is to point both at the right things, not just more things.
His answer has nothing to do with AI consulting tools and everything to do with attention. Practically, he breaks his day into clear blocks and tries to batch work so a single piece of output feeds multiple parts of his business. That is a version of leverage that maps directly onto the Efficiency vector in the 4 Productivity Vectors framework: getting more useful output from the same hour, not cramming more hours into the day.
The part he emphasized most, though, maps to Ownership and Well-being. If you like the work, he said, your energy stays high and it stops feeling like a grind. That is not a throwaway line from someone who has never been tired. It is a filter he uses when deciding what to keep in his portfolio and what to cut.
What This Means for How You Use AI at Work
Andrew’s quickfire round gave me the clearest summary of his whole philosophy. His advice for someone stuck in work they do not enjoy: “Just get it done, and then move on to something you do enjoy.” His take on the most overrated management concept right now: obsessing over what competitors are doing instead of what your own customers actually want. His best decision made against conventional advice: joining Kaspersky when everyone told him not to work for a Russian-based company. Five years later, he called it one of the best moves of his career.
None of that came from a prompt. It came from 25 years of paying attention to what actually works, in rooms AI has never been in. That is the case for AI consulting done right: use the tool for speed and volume, and keep a human in the loop for the call that actually matters. If you want to ask Andrew about it directly, he takes messages on LinkedIn.
If you want more conversations like this one, on how senior operators actually think about time, energy, and decision making, join the newsletter or browse the full 4 Productivity Vectors methodology.
AI Consulting FAQs
Will AI replace management consultants?
Not entirely. AI consulting is already replacing the research and information-gathering work junior consultants used to do, but it cannot replace the judgment senior advisors bring from years of pattern recognition. Andrew Winton expects weaker firms to struggle while firms that adapt, like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, keep a real role in large transformational projects.
What is governed advisory?
Governed advisory is a model, used by platforms like Digital Advisory, where client briefs are anonymized, advisors are screened for conflicts of interest, and advice from multiple senior executives is synthesized into a single report with no individual attribution. It sits between traditional consulting and open expert marketplaces.
Why don’t board directors understand AI?
Board seats are typically filled based on industry experience and governance skill, not technical fluency, and AI literacy has moved faster than board recruitment and training cycles. Andrew Winton points to data showing only 2 percent of board directors have meaningful AI experti
Episode Transcription
Andrew (00:00)
we speak to, lots and lots of people in senior positions around the world, and they all have the same attributes. They all have the same, you know, the same mindset. In their own company, they feel like they can’t do any more.
but they’ve got so much to give and so we’re giving them this incredible opportunity to go and become known experts outside of their own organisation, help maybe smaller companies to learn from them and also getting towards that stage in their career to start doing some kind non-executive director roles or maybe some board roles.
Santi Tacoronte (00:46)
Andrew Winton is a global CMO and growth leader with over 25 years of experience scaling media and platform businesses.
He has led marketing and commercial functions at PepsiCo, Amazon Prime Video, Sky, The Times,
Today he serves as CMO at Digital Advisory, a governed platform that connects organizations with senior independent advisors for high-stakes decisions. He is also the creator of Boom Marketing, a full-stack marketing education program built on Cosmos.
He advises founders and leadership teams with practical frameworks rather than theory
And holds a level seven diploma for executive and senior level coaches and mentors. Today he’s here to talk about the future of consultancy and how wisdom wins over information and AI when it comes to decision making.
Santi Tacoronte (01:40)
Andrew Winton, welcome to Productivity.
Andrew (01:43)
well thank you very much for the invitation. Thank you for the, for such a warm welcome. It’s great to be here.
Santi Tacoronte (01:49)
And a a the numbers in consultancy say you know I’m a numbers guy. The market’s still growing. Yet we see McKinsey cutting off five thousand people, Accenture retraining, eighty thousand headcounts. Sorry for that word, it’s horrible. Eighty thousand employees. What’s actually happening inside these firms? Is it a structural shift?
Andrew (02:18)
I think for sure, there’s definitely a change in the nature of how consulting is being delivered now. AI has changed the nature of these businesses and they’re recognising that change and they’re adapting to that change. AI can deliver a lot of the research and insights that they used to do at the junior level. And so they’re just recalibrating their businesses based on the new technology that we see around us and we’re all using ourselves.
So yes, they’re learning and adapting and that is having quite a big impact on their business.
Santi Tacoronte (02:53)
By now we already know that entry-level consulting is been eating alive probably is a bit exaggerated, but numbers said that hirings for for for junior analysts, and you just gave one of the reasons it’s going down. How does that impact the pipeline of the next generation senior advisors? Because you know, and we’re gonna speak about wisdom later on.
wisdom comes with experience. But you’re not giving experience now to all these junior consultants that were doing analysis and all this thing. How do you think this is gonna impact consultancy?
Andrew (03:33)
think consulting is going to be significantly impacted because exactly as you say, junior researchers learn their craft, they learn their skills, they learn from people who are more senior and there’s been always a very clear career progression within these consulting firms and you learn as you grow and you grow as you go more senior.
and you get that experience of understanding how the nature of the consulting firms work as you move your way up through the chain. So if there isn’t so many people starting on that step-by-step career progression that normally happens within consulting firms, then at some point there’s going to be a drop-off of all these senior experience consultants and there won’t be the same flow-through of junior people who’ve been through the same steps of experience that will take them to the senior level with all that experience that comes with it.
So I think that will ultimately, in the future…
know, begin to degrade the quality of the consulting because you you’ll have all the research, you’ll have the great insights, but you won’t have that judgment that comes from experience and learning, you know, over time. it’s interesting to see, I think, how they will, you know, manage that, you know, pipeline. It’s not a problem right now, but, you know, and maybe not for another 15 or 20 years, but that will be an issue that they’ll have to face, you know, as the years go on.
Santi Tacoronte (04:58)
Speaking of one of the main businesses that consultancy used to sell which was information and information asymmetry. They knew things or they had access to to information you didn’t have. Now I do believe, Andrew, that they still have access to information that you don’t have. But a big chunk or a big part of the information they used to provide is now publicly available on a simple prompt. What is left?
for consultancy to sell.
Andrew (05:31)
I mean, I think this is a question that they’re all grappling with because, and we’ve seen examples, haven’t we, in the news where, you know, they’ve been kind of caught out selling big, you know, packages of information still with kind of AI prompt.
know, bits and pieces left in there that kind of expose them as clearly just AI prompted material. So there’s still a role for consulting firms. Like I’m sure in my mind, you know, these big firms like McKinsey or the other big consulting firms have got a very important role to play and that will continue. And they can still serve, you know, their customers and give them advice for those very big transformational programs when it’s complex and it cuts across, you know, major
parts of business ecosystems, then it’s not just about the AI information that can still help them, but they’re going to have to adapt and learn how AI can become a technology that they use to empower their business to deliver better services, better consulting. And I think the lazy consulting firms or the poor ones will probably fall by the wayside. And you’ll find that the really good ones, the really smart ones like Boston Consulting Group or McKinsey or the other ones, they will, as they always have done, they’ll learn and
they’ll evolve and they’ll use this technology to their advantage and I think these early slip-ups that they’re making I’m sure will kind of you know will work themselves out in the future so you know the consulting market is huge it’s know four or five hundred billion dollars globally this is if not more so there’s room for these players to still offer you know great services to businesses that want that kind of big you know big transformational insights for sure.
Santi Tacoronte (07:14)
There’s a difference between having data and knowing what to do with it. You have worked with organizations, with large organizations for 25 years. In your opinion, how does leaders confuse these two things? Data or information and action and moving, taking action out of this data.
Andrew (07:38)
I think in my mind it’s really…
clear and simple, but a of people seem to get sort of confused by it. They confuse data as knowledge. And data is just information that you have to do something with. So the best information that you can pull together to make a decision is then how it enables you to make the best decision. it’s one of those things that, yes, you want to have as much information about a particular situation as you possibly can.
you’ve got to, you know, A, understand which bits of data are more useful than others because all data is equal. Some is more useful, it’s more powerful, it’s more factual, it’s more verified or whatever. And then once you’ve got that data, it’s the human judgment, the experience or the smart people that
that take that information and help you inform which is the right direction to go. So taking insights and actionable insights from data is the valuable piece. The data itself is just the toolbox in which you pick the pieces that you need to help you make the best decision for where you need to go next.
Santi Tacoronte (08:56)
Let’s deep dive on this one a little bit because I feel and I think it’s fair to say I’ve seen companies, individuals trying to prompt away their strat away from from a prompt their strategy. How much of a strategy do you think
Andrew (08:58)
Hmm.
Santi Tacoronte (09:22)
AI can help you, this toolbox that you you you mentioned, and and how much do you think it’s becoming, let’s call it, a template, a framework that everybody has? and and how should leaders deal with strategy in the era where information is so accessible?
Andrew (09:46)
I think it’s, I don’t think it’s, in a way it hasn’t really changed.
AI has just enabled us to of collate and collect information much more readily, much more quickly, in much bigger volumes than ever before. But again, you’ve still got to test it. We know that AI doesn’t always deliver 100 % accurate data. So you need to make sure that the data that you’re getting is accurate. And therefore, you still need human judgment to verify that it’s true and helps you make the right decision. And AI is also…
a tool that can give you kind of very deep and narrow information about a topic, but doesn’t necessarily give you the breadth that sometimes you need. So, for example,
In Amazon, they’re very good at getting a lot of data about a very narrow topic, but it doesn’t necessarily give you the breadth to make a broader decision. It’s the difference between, you can be, your clock can be very accurate. You know, it might tell you the time very accurately, but it might be completely the wrong time. So it can be very accurate in terms of its precision, but the time can be completely wrong. And that’s where you kind of got this very deep, you know, pool of data, but not very
broad pool of data and sometimes you need to take the different data points across the different, you know, the landscape to give you a much clearer understanding of what’s happening before you then decide where you should move to next.
Santi Tacoronte (11:13)
Hmm. I read that only two percent of board directors have meaningful AI expertise. Boards are making companies decision, including AI decisions.
But they don’t necessarily understand AI completely. What do you think is the real cost of this gap?
Andrew (11:40)
I think that is probably one of the biggest gaps that needs to be very carefully addressed because if you’ve got boards making decisions from their own kind of AI prompting that they’re doing on the fly without really understanding or making sure that the nuances of that AI information are correct, it is like the Wild West. if you’ve got board members going in and just prompting ChatGPT or Claude and coming to the board with all of this information,
thinking that they’ve done their due diligence, then they haven’t. And I think this is where businesses have got to get much more rigorous, in my opinion, about the tools that they enable and how they’re ensuring that the AI platforms that they’re letting their employees from top to bottom use are verified properly and being strictly controlled so that the information that’s coming out from them is helpful and accurate. Because if it’s not, then it doesn’t take a small decision or a big decision
But made slightly inaccurately by just one or two percent based on an inaccurate AI prompting That’s made the decision wrong in a huge organization might be a very very significant Decision further down the line that could have huge ramifications for their business if they’re making it You know with them with with data that is misinformed them in the first place from an AI That’s hallucinated and told them something not quite accurately. You know a friend of mine He
he
was on LinkedIn the other day doing a video, 18 months ago his business partner had asked AI to do a bio for her and it did a bio for her and it said that she’d written a book and it said exactly what this book was but she’d never written a book. So it kind of came up with a book she’d never written and actually what they then did, this guy and his business partner, they decided to write the book that AI had said that they had already written and they did. But originally she had never written.
this book. It didn’t exist. was completely hallucinated by AI in her bio. And people can see this and can believe that this information is accurate. And this is what worries me is the data layer that we’re all believing.
Isn’t 100 % accurate and at what point and again and inaccurate data layered on top of inaccurate data just gets worse and worse You know, it’s kind of like Chinese whispers if you have you know She’s written a book in this prompt But by ten points down the route, she’s written a whole library of books and she never even wrote one book You know, know, this is kind of how it extrapolates, you know a tiny piece of misinformation in one prompt that sits in Every single LLM, know citation over a period of months suddenly evolves into this
huge inaccuracy around a position and that really does worry me a lot, I think.
Santi Tacoronte (14:35)
Andrew, I want to capitalize on your expertise in media, marketing and sales. I recently wrote a piece, which is coming I think next this week in in LinkedIn and and in Medium about something that made me really sad, which is a a a tweet by Nike, which was probably the epitome of AI created content, right? Super prefabricated AI expression. I was thinking to myself
Andrew (15:01)
Mm-hmm.
Santi Tacoronte (15:05)
Really? Nike? It’s you know, yeah, you are saving a few bucks. Fine, whatever, right? But it looks so bad. But then I started to think, does this really have an impact on the consumer? Is the consumer aware in general that
Andrew (15:10)
Crazy. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Santi Tacoronte (15:25)
This sounds very AI generic or is it only me because I am working around AI all day? And then I had this second thought, Andy, that I want to run through you, which is will we get used to it and normalize this sort of expressions? This is not history. This is history in the making, you know? I was thinking, well, people will likely get used to this very soon. What’s your take on that?
Andrew (15:34)
Mm.
Mmm.
I mean, it worries me, it makes me sad, you know, that…
Santi Tacoronte (15:54)
Mm.
Andrew (15:55)
I can see all this AI generated content. I was mentioning before, I was in London yesterday. And when you’re in London, you’re bombarded with advertising on the tube in particular. There’s tube car panels, there’s big A boards, there’s digital boards down the sides of every escalator in the tubes. And you see all this content from brands. And now, of course, because it’s digital, can, know, small brands, big brands, can all advertise. And you see this and you think, oh my goodness, some of it is so poor.
Like the messaging is awful, the meaning is unclear.
There’s no marketing skill. There’s no emotion. There’s nothing here at all. It’s literally just filling a gap. And it will do nothing for the brand. It will do nothing for their business. It’s literally going to generate no engagement with customers whatsoever. But unfortunately, I think what AI does is it opens up this world of creative and messaging and the ability for every business to
do that quite quickly on the fly and sort of get away with it and so say things like well we’re just testing lots of different messages so it’s easy now with AI just to kind of come up with a hundred different messages and test them out and see which ones resonate with our know with our ICP or with our target audience and then we’ll optimize towards those ones but what a horrible world where all that kind of amazing creativity and thoughtfulness and you know smart advertising that kind of really draws you in and makes you feel
emotionally
connected to a brand is gone, know, the world will be, you know, increasingly blander and less interesting and more flat. And I think that is always sad because, you know, great marketing, great advertising is like art and art is a real sort of, you know, leveler of how smart and civilized a culture is. And if you bring it all down to the lowest common denominator, then we’re all going to live in a very beige and boring world. you
It will be a sadder world without smart, clever, interesting, engaging marketing and funny copy and emotional resonance, in my opinion.
Santi Tacoronte (18:11)
And yeah, I would understand if a small shop, the flower shop in your in your corner, or the bakery or the coffee shop, does that, because obviously the means and the budgets are not there, nor the time. But why do you think big companies are falling prey of the AI trap?
Andrew (18:24)
Mm-hmm.
That’s a really interesting question because that was kind of when I was talking I was thinking about that as well. You know, why would Nike with its, you know, billions and billions of dollars, you know, why would it choose to go down that pathway? And I don’t really know the answer to that other than…
Possibly they’re just trying to see whether it has an impact. You know, they’re trying something different there They’re going again to do things more quick more quickly more cheaply
I don’t know. mean, it doesn’t really make any sense to me. I’m trying to think when I was in these large companies, big advertising campaigns would go through a lot of iterations and a lot of people would be involved in it and normally a mixture of very creative people and commercial people and it would be quite a difficult challenge to push it all the way through. So you wouldn’t normally just go live with things very, very quickly without a lot of thought. But as a result, ultimately, every business is commercially driven.
And even if Nike with its huge budgets can do things in a way that it thinks is still delivering good value but at much lower cost, then I suppose they’re all falling into that trap and trying to see whether AI will deliver equal value but at much less cost. But I think what is the cost that you’re really impacting on is hard to know and you won’t know for a long time because if your brand value begins to deteriorate because people don’t feel emotionally engaged to your brand anymore because you’re not doing things
in the same way you were in the past. Your adverts aren’t so emotive or you’re using AI and people aren’t seeing and feeling and being engaged in the same way, then your brand equity will go and that emotional connection to your brand will begin to suffer. And I don’t think any big brand can afford that because AI and technology is enabling small brands to pop up all over the place and challenger brands are constantly
popping up and unibbling the value of these big brands. So don’t think they can afford to do that. In my opinion, they’ve got to continue to be the beacons of incredible brand experiences because that’s what they can afford to do differently. And so I think they should really think carefully about how they continue to take that very high-level brand advertising, emotional, engaging campaigns that they run because I think they’re the things that
keep people attracted to their brands in the future.
Santi Tacoronte (21:10)
We’ve discussed consultancy, we’ve discussed AI and the a the the chunk of consultancy that AI is eating away from from them
Now you have you are part of something called digital advisory, which I wanted you to explain now in the next few minutes because I find the concept to be quite interesting. And and the way I understand it, Andy, is that the classic consulting engagement is long and it’s very costly. and the experts marketplace it’s
Andrew (21:35)
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Mm-hmm.
Santi Tacoronte (21:48)
complex, noisy and difficult to access. So you’re trying to fill a gap between expertise and consultancy? How does it work?
Andrew (21:58)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So along with some other people.
some very smart people, we’ve built what we call the digital advisory. It’s a human led advisory platform where we’re building an ecosystem of hundreds of executives who’ve got 20, 25 years of experience who are doing the roles that they’re doing now. And they’ve got all of this experience through lived work. They all work for big global companies across the whole global reach.
across every sector and across every function in the business. So we’ve got already about 350 and we’re growing in terms of these advisors. And the idea is these advisors can offer to clients or companies the ability to help move decisions forward. So it’s not trying to take the place of big consulting firms that do big, long transformational programs. This is fitting into helping businesses who are maybe using AI to help
generate information and maybe coming up with lots and lots of options, this is human led advisory to help you narrow down those decisions to make the best one of the choices that you’ve got. So it’s something that boards could use to help navigate a choice of a new technology or a new platform or a pivot in terms of its budget responsibilities or movements. These are for quick insights delivered
within a number of days from senior executives who’ve been there and done that and can give you their insights. We consolidate that for you and present them back to you in a simple, short report which gives you this instilled wisdom from all these incredible years of experience from these brilliant executives. It’s something that no one else is doing in this way. And it’s sort of helping, in our minds, balance this AI human
human judgment positioning. And we think it’s a really interesting way that businesses can make sure that they’re using AI, but they’re getting this human element to help them make sure that the judgment is moving in the right direction.
Santi Tacoronte (24:22)
And yeah, I would imagine those are high-stakes decisions. So I must ask you what does governance mean in practice when you’re trying to connect an organization to an expert of another from another organization that, as you said, has been there already or can give you good advice about caveats or pitfalls or whatever. How do you ensure governance between this very senior advisor and and that sensitive decision?
Andrew (24:51)
So of course we have lots of checks and balances to make sure that there’s no conflicts of interest between the advisors and the clients. And the advice is always anonymized anyway. So we would use a number of advisors. for example, if a client is in a business and their brief is around
moving a big chunk of their marketing budget from their existing performance budget, say using an AI tool to help them try and understand whether that move is going to help them or not. They would build the brief and then we would choose the right number of advisors with the relevant experience from our pool of advisors to inform their thoughts in that decision.
When a client puts a brief in to a digital advisory, it’s always anonymised from both sides. we make sure that the client’s brief is anonymised and the advisors that we choose are carefully selected and no conflicts of interest are always checked beforehand. And when the advisors complete the brief on their phones, we always then synthesise all of that information and the way that we collate it and report
it back to the client. There’s never individual attribution to any of the comments or any of the feedback or advice that comes from any of the advisors. So everything is aggregated and everything is checked carefully all the way through that process. At the end of the report we always do explain who the advisors are that have contributed to that particular report and if the client would like to have a deeper dive with any of those advisors on a kind of one-to-one basis.
They’re able to do that on a video call, but nothing in the report as it stands is ever individually attributed to any of the advisors. So it’s something that we’re very conscious of. These are senior advisors in roles in large organizations, and their advice is offered as advice only, and that’s how it’s always taken.
Santi Tacoronte (27:00)
Andrew, for a leader that is watching this right now or listening to this right now, who’s never used an external advisor or is used to traditional consultancy, what kind of decision is an example for this model?
Andrew (27:24)
So with digital advisory we’re not trying to replace the big consulting firms and the kind of big transformational decisions that they can help you with. Digital advisory is much more for smaller but more urgent and more pressing decisions that run through your normal yearly cycle of activity. So it might be a budget question, it might be a campaign question, it might be a technology or platform question, it might be a question around
you know, a direction of travel, it might be about a board decision that you’ve got coming up in a couple of weeks time. You what we can offer is validation of your own thinking and we can help you narrow that down and you can use digital advisory as a quick, inexpensive decision forum in which you can help to use to validate that decision. So if you go into the board in three weeks time with a decision around a new technology platform and you know there’s going to be questions,
and you’ve got a very clear view about where you think it should go, then that would be a great one to use digital advisory for. can get, you you put your brief in, you can get a number of advisors to give you their feedback about your decision and either validate your decision, which you can use with the board, or maybe make you question your decision and maybe even make you move in a different direction. But again, you can still use that document to validate that new direction.
in your board meetings. You can say, I’ve had this decision reviewed by X number of senior executives within the digital advisory board, and this is what they said, and I’ve taken that judgment on board and I’ve moved in this direction. So it’s a of, it’s a rubber stamp of your decision. It helps your judgment. And it’s like I say, for those decisions that flow through your, you know, either your normal cycle of kind of planning, or maybe a slightly larger.
change or pivot to your strategy that doesn’t require a huge consulting budget or you have months in which to help inform you, make that change of planning.
Santi Tacoronte (29:32)
I wanna move a little bit towards the this other important part of of digital advisory platform which are the experts. And I wanna I wanna do it with your own example, Andrew, because you’ve been a very successful executive in very large companies and you’ve done almost everything that is imaginable. When did you decide that
you wanted to do something else. When you d and you know, I I don’t mean to say that you wanted to jump off the corporate ladder or or something like that, but when you did you decide and why did you decide that you wanted to do more?
Andrew (30:03)
Yeah.
Yes. I think for me the decision was clear that you learn a lot from large organisations, but they operate slowly and they operate within a very tight political framework. The freedom and pace that start-ups and scale-ups can bring you enables you a sense of freedom and purpose and you can bring all of the learnings that you’ve created in your years of working in large corporates, which
which are often missing in startups. The processes, the operational skills, the abilities that you learn in large businesses are usually entirely missing in small businesses. So can bring all the best bits of your experience from corporate life and bring them to small businesses that really need some of those processes and systems in place, but they don’t come with all the baggage of the politics and the slowness of delivery. So you kind of get the best of both worlds and you can really adapt and grow.
And I love the fact that I’m learning from multiple CEOs and founders that I work with all the time. So I’ve kind got six times more plus businesses every month I’m working with. And I’m learning more and more. And all that learning from all these founders and startups I work in across all these different sectors, I can bring to each of them and to new clients. So for me, it’s a really energizing and evolving and constantly learning.
in a way that don’t think I would get so much learning from working in one company for a long period of time. So it’s my brain and it’s for my energy.
Santi Tacoronte (31:52)
You have collected 300 more than 300 experts across industries, expertise, and I went through the list and wow. First of all, congrats for bringing together so much brain power. But then I thought, I don’t think these people with the roles they have had, and they have currently
Andrew (32:10)
Thank you.
Santi Tacoronte (32:20)
I moved my money. What do you think it’s moving all these professionals to collaborate with your platform with Digital Advisor to give advice to other companies?
Andrew (32:22)
Mm.
Yeah. I like to think it’s because people who are at that stage in their careers, you know, are looking at how they can give back. everyone we speak to, and we speak to, you know, lots and lots of people in these senior positions around the world, and they all have the same attributes. They all have the same, you know, the same mindset. They all have all this experience. In their own company, they feel like they can’t do any more.
but they’ve got so much to give and so we’re giving them this incredible opportunity to go and become known experts outside of their own organisation, help maybe smaller companies to learn from them and also they’re thinking about the next period of their career when they’re probably maybe now getting towards that stage in their career that they’re thinking about maybe I want to start doing some kind non-executive director roles or maybe some board roles.
for other companies. So this is a stepping stone, you know, gently into that sort of world of advisory and any any D work. So I think that’s important. And I think the other thing that’s a bit unique about digital advisory is that for all the advisors that are in the global board, we enable them to connect and grow as a network. So we allow them to introduce themselves to each other and we encourage them to connect with each other. So it’s like a mini.
a mini LinkedIn, but only with this very small select group of senior executives who can reach out to each other. We encourage them to do that. So if they’re in London, go and have a coffee with somebody else who’s in the board, or if they’re traveling, see who might be in the country in which they’re traveling. And they start, and they’re starting to do that. And I think there is that networking piece, which is also, I think, important for people of that kind of era. We like to network. We like to meet other people. We like to build our
our connections in that way. So I think all those things together I think are the sort of reasons that it sort of really works for that group of people.
Santi Tacoronte (34:35)
I love it Andrew. And I was smiling because you said it’s some some sort of small LinkedIn. And with all the with all the pressure and and how under fire is LinkedIn right now, I I wasn’t so sure you want your network to become another LinkedIn. But let’s leave it let’s leave it here.
Andrew (34:41)
Yeah.
I know.
I said it carefully. I said it carefully. mean, you we’re not a social media network. It’s
just the ability to kind of connect with people and engage in that way. But, you know, it’s a nice example. You know, I think, you we all have our opinion about LinkedIn these days. You know, love it, although it has become what it’s become.
Santi Tacoronte (35:00)
Get it.
Productivity specifically, which is the meta topic of this podcast, although we touch upon many different things. see I hate it but I and and and I think you’re gonna agree. Productivity is often framed as doing more or more output. Alright? But you have your own thoughts on this. You seem to be arguing something different, to that productivity is is
Andrew (35:20)
Mm.
Santi Tacoronte (35:41)
doing different things on purpose. What’s your take on productivity, AI and increasing output, which is what we’re doing now. Basically we’re doing the same we would been doing, faster. And and where should smart leaders, where do you do advise your group of very sharp leaders to go in terms of productivity?
Andrew (36:02)
think for me productivity is around you have so much time every day, how do you use that in the most efficient and effective way? You have so much energy, how do you make sure you’re using it in the right way to make the right decision? So how can you use the right tools to give you the best information to make the right decisions about how you use your energy and therefore your productive time? I think people are burning out because they’re working so hard all the time they never stop.
So my view of productivity is you create your own boundaries of what you will do and when you’ll do it and make sure you’re maximising that energy that you’ve got in the right direction. And for me, what I try and do is be very clear about my day and I break my day up into very clear chunks. And I know when I will do certain things and when I have a break and when I stop doing things and when I start doing things. And I always try and join things together.
So I think my productivity hack is how do you make sure if you’ve got multiple tasks, how do you try and do many tasks in one go? So often you can create a piece of work which can then feed out into multiple parts of my ecosystem. It doesn’t work for everybody, but I can do one thing and it can then feed several things for several clients because I can just tweak the output and it will deliver multiple outputs from one sort of piece of work.
that’s kind of how I work. But I think ultimately if you like what you’re doing then your energy level is high and it doesn’t feel like work, it just feels like it’s what you do. Now I work in this way, I don’t feel like work is a chore, I feel like work is just blended in with my life. And I love engaging with people and working with different people and the energy that that brings me drives my energy. So I think that’s how I work.
Santi Tacoronte (38:02)
I’ve prepared a bunch of questions here that I want you to ask to answer in in 30 seconds or less. And I want to start with this first one that you following up on the first one that you said. Number one, what is the advice you give, one advice you give to someone who is working on something they don’t enjoy?
Andrew (38:09)
Okay.
Just get it done. Get it done and then move on to something you do enjoy.
Santi Tacoronte (38:32)
Number two, one book that changed how you think about leadership.
Andrew (38:37)
It’s a book called Will It Make the Boat Go Faster by somebody called Ben Hunt Davis. And he was an Olympic rower who won gold medal in Sydney. And it made me realize that leadership is about two things. One, about a shared common objective that everybody knows where you’re trying to go. And then a recognition that everybody involved has different ways of being great. And you need to understand how everybody in your team
operates at their best possible performance levels and everybody does that in different ways and your job as a leader is to help people know where you’re going and understand all the individual strengths in your team so that they work together collectively towards that goal.
Santi Tacoronte (39:23)
Number three, what is the most overrated management concept right now?
Andrew (39:28)
I think for me, one of the great things at Amazon was they never obsessed about what the competition was doing. They obsessed about what the customer wanted and how do we make sure that we deliver what the customer wants in the best possible way. So I think for me, this kind of obsession that some companies have about looking at what is best practice, what is our competition doing. You never do better than just trying to copy your competition. You do better.
by going your own way, thinking about your own product for your own customer. So for me, best practice, forget it, and don’t obsess about what your competition is doing.
Santi Tacoronte (40:10)
Number four, what is an AI tool you actually use daily?
Andrew (40:16)
I mean I use, every day I use ChatGPT and Claude and I think, you know, for me just pick one that you kind of enjoy and get the best value from and then just make sure you stick to it, you know, giving as much information as you want so that the outputs that you get from it are, you know, the best that you possibly can. I mean I’ve tried various ones and I’m moving around a bit but for me, you know, ChatGPT and Claude and…
they both deliver good results for me.
Santi Tacoronte (40:48)
And number five, the best decision you made by ignoring conventional advice.
Andrew (40:56)
I think for me, when I consider, when I joined Kaspersky, which was a Russian based cyber security company, a lot of people were telling me that was a bad idea. You you shouldn’t go and work for a company that’s kind of Russian based. But actually I did and it was a great decision. It was a brilliant company. had an incredible five years working there, doing things I probably could never do in almost any other company that I’d ever worked in or could think to work in.
Sometimes you’ve got to go with your gut and ignore what people say and just do what you think instinctively makes sense for you.
Santi Tacoronte (41:34)
Andrew, let’s wrap up this conversation. for leaders, the many leaders that listen to this podcast, that are willing to try digital advisory and the use of expertise and wisdom that you have made accessible, what is the best way they can do that?
Andrew (41:57)
The best way is to reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. You can find me very easily. Send me a message there and then I will always get back to you and we’d love to talk to anybody who would like to be a potential advisor or if you’re a business that thinks you could get value from our services then we’d love to talk to you and let you try our services, complementary as well is available. you know, reach out to me for anything related to digital advisory.
Or if you just want to connect with me and learn a bit more about my experience and think you might have a good connection with me, then I’d to network and meet new people any time.
Santi Tacoronte (42:37)
Andrew, thank you so much for this inspiring conversation and conventional as well. those are my takeaways of today’s conversation, discussion. The first one is that consultancy is in evolution, in transition. It’s more and more clear that clients will stop booking or buying certain services and they would
go for other type of things. And the second is how happy made me make me see that you are creating something different based on human wisdom. Which as much as we discuss how amazing is AI, which we all use on a daily basis and makes our life much easier, there is this human feeling, this human gut, the wisdom that is impossible to explain.
That you are preserving and that you are promoting so we never lose it. Andrew Winton, thank you very much for being with us today.
Andrew (43:41)
Thank you very much for the opportunity. It’s been great to talk to you today. Thank you.