AI tools for consultants, sorted by the job each one does on an engagement

AI for consultants is less a question of which tool is best than of which job you are handing it. A consultant's week has six of them: research across a stack of documents, slides and documents, notes from calls, data and models, client email, and the general thinking-and-drafting work. Below: the tools other lists name most often, grouped by that job, each in its maker's own words with the price its maker publishes, plus the one job none of them is built for.

Most consultants already have two or three of these. Fewer can say what each is for, what a year of it costs, or where two overlap. This page sorts that out, job by job. Who is writing: Equerry, whose own app does the last job on the page, the record of what each client said, and sits in its own section rather than in the list, so the list stays about other makers' products. No maker paid to be here, there are no affiliate links, and a subscription to anything listed earns us nothing.

How the list was put together

• The maker describes the tool. Every description in quotation marks is from the maker's own site, help centre or App Store listing, read 6 November 2026. Nothing was tested or scored; within a job the order is alphabetical.
• Prices are as the maker publishes them, with the billing period, because "$17 a month" can mean a $200 commitment. Where a maker's page is priced in euros rather than dollars, the entry says so and gives the euro figure; nothing is converted. Prices can exclude tax, change often, and some makers show promotions to some visitors, so confirm at the source before you buy.
• It is a map, not a ranking. The tools do different jobs, and which one fits depends on your firm's policy and the way you work. If you are choosing for a firm rather than for yourself, the question shifts to the business plans and to your firm's AI policy, which usually names the approved tools before anyone compares them.

Every tool on one screen

General assistants

These four do the work of several rows below: a first pass at synthesis, a first draft of anything, a chart from a pasted table. The useful question for a consultant is what each one is allowed to see. Three of them reach further by connecting a whole account, which is a choice to make deliberately when the account holds seven confidential relationships.

• ChatGPT. OpenAI's help centre: "Projects keep related chats, files, and instructions together. ChatGPT can use that context to support ongoing work, such as writing, research, or planning." Files can be added "by uploading PDFs, spreadsheets, docs, images, or by pasting text". Its memory article says that "When Memory is enabled, ChatGPT can remember relevant preferences and details from your chats and other available sources", and that "Depending on your plan and region, those sources can include" saved files and "content from connected apps, such as Gmail". Price: Plus is "$20/month (billed monthly)"; the pricing page's FAQ says "We offer monthly plans for Go, Plus and Business and annual plans for Business and Enterprise." For what you can send and what it remembers, see ChatGPT for project managers, which covers the same client-update work.
• Claude. Anthropic's pricing page: Pro is "For everyday work", Max "For all-day work", Team "For teams of 2 to 150". The page lists "Claude for Microsoft 365" and "Claude Slides" among the features, and "Connect your apps and tools" on the free plan; whether Claude can read your emails covers its email connector. Price: Pro is "$17" "Per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front). $20 if billed monthly."; Max "$100" "Per month"; a Team standard seat "$20" "Per seat / month if billed annually. $25 if billed monthly."
• Gemini. Google's subscriptions page describes Google AI Pro as "higher access" to Gemini, with "Gemini in Gmail, Docs and more" and, in its FAQ, "Deep Research and a 1 million token context window". Price: the page shows "€21.99 EUR/month" for Google AI Pro, the euro price as the page renders it; no dollar price was shown.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft: "Copilot is built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams so your team can begin with the tools they know and keep workflows intact." It draws on the firm's own mail, files and meetings, which is the point and the thing to clear with the firm first. Price: the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on is "Originally starting from $21.00 now starting from $18.00" per user a month, paid yearly; the page says the discount "is available between July 1, 2026, and December 31, 2026", that "promotional pricing applies to the first year only", and that the add-on "is available only to existing Microsoft 365 customers with an eligible Business plan".

Research and synthesis

The first two weeks of an engagement are reading: board packs, a data room, twenty interview notes, last year's strategy deck. The two tools here are built around sources rather than open conversation, which suits that work. The discipline that makes any of them safe to rely on: ask for the passage behind every point, and read it before the finding goes on a slide. A synthesis you cannot trace to its source is a hypothesis, not a finding.

• Gemini Notebook. Google's sign-in page for it: "Your research and thinking partner, grounded in the information you trust, built with the latest Gemini models"; its home page: "The responses you get will always be grounded in the information you provide." The old NotebookLM address now redirects to this product. Price: no stand-alone price on its page; Google AI Pro lists it as a "Research and writing assistant with 5x more Audio Overviews, notebooks and more" (euro price above).
• Perplexity. Its App Store listing: "Accurate answers to any question, backed by sources and citations." Price: the US App Store listing shows in-app purchases of "Perplexity Pro $20.00" and "Perplexity Max $200.00".

Slides and documents

None of these replaces the storyline; they take an outline and your notes and return a first deck in the firm's template, or a one-page document from a prompt. All three publish a PowerPoint path, which is what matters when the client's deck template is the one that counts.

• Beautiful.ai. "Every seat includes unlimited AI content generation, over 300 Smart Slide layouts, and PowerPoint import and export." Pro is "For individuals who need to create professional presentations that impress." Price: Pro "$14.50" "/mo" "Billed annually", or "$45" billed monthly "For ad hoc projects"; "Teams of 2 to 20 pay $40 per user per month billed annually, or $50 billed monthly." The page offers "Try it free for 14 days."
• Gamma. Its free plan covers "Simple presentations, docs, websites, social, and images", can "Import from PDF & PPTX" and "Export to PDF, PPTX, PNG & Google Slides". Price: the page is priced in euros: Free "€0"; Plus "€8" a seat a month, "€96 per seat, billed annually"; Pro "€18" a seat a month, "€216 per seat, billed annually". "Prices are subject to tax depending on your location."
• Plus AI. "Includes both Google Slides and Powerpoint"; Basic lets you "Create AI presentations in Google Slides and PowerPoint". Price: Basic "$10" "per user/month, billed annually. $15/user billed monthly."; Pro "$20" "per user/month, billed annually. $25/user billed monthly." "All plans start with a 7-day free trial with 1,000 AI credits."

Meeting notes

Where a maker records calls, we say so in its own words, because whether a client interview may be recorded is the interviewee's call and often the engagement letter's. Two of the three can work without a bot in the room; all three listen to the call, and Granola's table calls its method "Bot-free, device-audio capture".

• Fireflies. Its pricing page lists "Record Zoom, Gmeet, MS teams, 10+" and "Record using Chrome extension without Fireflies bot". Price: Free "$0"; Pro "$10 per seat / month, billed annually" or $18 monthly; Business "$19 per seat / month, billed annually" or $29 monthly; Enterprise $39 a seat a month, "ANNUAL ONLY".
• Granola. "The AI notepad for back-to-back meetings." It "Uses your computer audio, so doesn't invite a bot", and is "Available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android". Price: Basic "$0" per user per month with "See limited meeting history" (its table says 30 days); Business "$14" per user per month with "Unlimited meeting notes and history"; Enterprise "$35" per user per month. No annual price on the page.
• Otter. "The world's smartest AI Notetaker"; its plan table says it joins "Zoom, MS Teams, and Google Meet" to write and share notes. Price: "Prices in USD". Basic is free with 300 monthly transcription minutes; Pro "$16.99" per user a month billed monthly, or "$8.33" per user a month billed annually; Business "$19.99" per user a month billed annually. The page also shows offers that apply only to some buyers.

Data and models

The spreadsheet work on an engagement is mostly cleaning a client's extract, cutting it three ways and charting it. The general assistants now do that from a pasted table or an uploaded file; Julius is built for it.

• ChatGPT data analysis. The plan table on OpenAI's pricing page lists "Data analysis", "Interactive tables and charts" and "Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Google Sheets extensions" as features, with "Data analysis" marked "Limited" on Free. Price: with the ChatGPT plan above.
• Copilot in Excel. One of the apps in Microsoft's "Copilot is built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams". Price: with the Copilot plan above.
• Julius. Its pricing page: "Analyze data and research, create presentations and reports, build websites, and generate images and video." Pro can "Analyze spreadsheets, documents, and data files" and "Create charts and presentations". Price: Plus "$20" USD a month, "For everyday analysis, research, and creative projects"; Pro "$45" USD a month; with annual billing ("SAVE 20%") the page shows $16 and $37 USD a month.

Client communication and notes

The reply that needs a decision, the recap after a workshop, the follow-up you owe after each call. These three sit in the email or the notes themselves. Two of them reach your mail by connecting the account, which is where a consultant reads the engagement letter before clicking yes.

• Grammarly. Pro lets you "Adjust your writing tone with ease" and "Rewrite full sentences with a click"; Free is for writing "without spelling and grammar mistakes". Price: the plans page is priced in euros: Free "€0" a month; Pro "€12" EUR, with no billing period shown beside the figure. Enterprise is "Contact Sales".
• Mem. Workspace "Keeps your notes, meetings, and ideas organized, connected, and easy to use"; Agent "Learns what matters from what you save and checks in when something needs you." Mem takes email: "An email sent to Mem counts as a Message to Mem." Its Pro plan adds Connections: "A Connection links Mem to an external source such as Gmail, Slack, or Todoist." Price: Free; Plus "$9" a month; Pro "$29" a month, with larger Pro tiers from $49 to $199 a month. No annual prices on the page.
• Superhuman Mail. Its Business plan adds "Auto drafts", "Ask AI" and "CRM integrations" on top of Starter's "Superhuman AI". Price: Starter "$25" "per member / month, billed annually"; Business "$33" "per member / month, billed annually", with "15% off for teams of 5+". Enterprise is "Contact Sales".

By tool: the shortlist, the chief-of-staff idea, and a system without AI

This page is the map. These guides take one question further than a map can:

• The best AI assistants for consultants judges eight of them (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Granola, Notion AI, Mem and Equerry) against a consultant's week: meeting prep, follow-ups, email and document recall, sources, and control over what's remembered.
• What an AI chief of staff is covers what people mean by the phrase, from the build-it-yourself version on Claude or ChatGPT to enterprise agents and inbox-and-calendar products, and what each kind reads, sends and costs.
• AI executive assistants compared looks at ten tools on what each does, costs and keeps about you, for anyone weighing an assistant across all their work rather than one engagement.
• How to stay organized as a consultant is the system that works without any AI at all.

AI in consulting: the firm-level reading, set aside

Search for AI in consulting and half the results are about the firms: how McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture and the rest are deploying AI inside their own practices, and the firms' own pages on AI for their clients. That is a real subject and a different one. It is a question about each firm's strategy, its tools and its policy, and this page makes no claim about any firm's. What it answers is the other reading: a consultant, at a firm or independent, deciding what goes into their own kit for the engagement in front of them. If your firm has an AI policy, it answers most of the questions on this page before you reach them; the list above is for the gaps it leaves and for the independent consultant who is the policy.

Where AI fits an engagement, and what stays with you

The jobs in the table land at different weights at each stage. Here is how they tend to fall from the first meeting to the last.

Around all of it sits the admin: the follow-up you owe after each call, the reply that needs a decision, the brief you meant to read before Thursday. That is where reducing admin work as a consultant usually starts, and it is less about writing faster than about not losing the thread between one client and the next. Every stage builds on what was said and decided in the one before, which is why the last job on this page matters more than its place at the end suggests.

Before you put client material into any AI tool

Three checks, in this order. First, your engagement letter and any NDA: some clients restrict where their material can go, and that overrides any vendor promise. Second, your firm's AI policy: many firms name approved tools and workspaces. Third, the plan you're on. OpenAI's enterprise privacy page (its own stamp reads "Updated: January 8, 2026"; re-read 6 November 2026) says: "By default, we do not use your business data for training our models." Its data-controls article, read the same day, says: "By default, OpenAI does not use content from ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, or ChatGPT for Healthcare workspaces to train its models", and for personal plans: "On personal workspaces with ChatGPT Free, Plus, or Pro, data sharing is enabled by default. You can turn off Improve the model for everyone and keep your chat history." Training is one question. Retention, who can see a shared workspace, and what the client contract allows are the others. For what each maker publishes on those, plan by plan, see whether ChatGPT is confidential and whether Claude is confidential.

What consultants choose not to paste

Whether a particular use is allowed is a matter for the engagement letter, the firm and the client, and this page draws no conclusion on it. What many consultants do is keep a short personal list of material that never goes into a general assistant without a clear yes:

• Anything the client marked confidential, or that the engagement letter or NDA names.
• Deal and transaction details: targets, valuations, terms, timetables.
• Personal data about the client's employees or customers, including the org chart behind a restructuring.
• Interview notes that name the person, especially where views were given in confidence.
• Data-room material shared under its own access terms.

The common workaround is to work from a redacted or anonymised version ("Client A", "the regional business"), which keeps the analysis and leaves out the names. Whatever the list, the same question applies to every tool, Equerry included: which of this material am I choosing to send, and does the client's contract allow it?

The job none of them hold: what each client said

Every tool above holds a thing: a chat, a deck, a transcript, a chart, a draft. None of them holds the conversation with a particular client as it moves. What did the CFO say about margin in the October review? Did procurement ever confirm the revised scope? Which of the three workstreams did the COO say could slip? The answers are spread across email threads, PDFs, your notes and a voice memo you'll never replay. Before each call you reconstruct the state of that one engagement from memory, and hope you didn't miss the reply that came in while you were with another client. The general assistants help if you keep each client's material together, and that works for what you remember to upload. The gap is the correspondence itself: the threads keep moving after you last pasted them in, and letting a general assistant reach your mail directly means connecting the whole account, not the four client threads that matter.

Equerry (this is our app) is a personal assistant for iPhone and iPad that keeps that record and briefs you from it. It connects to nothing: you hand it things, the way you would hand them to an assistant, and ask it questions later. In one exchange, the Monday after an interview round:

Equerry has an email address of its own, ending in @mail.getequerry.app. Put it on the CC line of a live thread and every later reply arrives on its own for as long as the address stays there; forwarding sends a thread as it stands; the original stays in your mailbox, and it never asks for your inbox. If you allow calendar access and set up Meeting Prep, a short brief on where things stand with that client arrives before the meeting, built from what you have shared, including the reply you hadn't opened yet. Price: Pro is $39.99 a month or $329 a year.

What Equerry is not: a research or drafting tool, a deck builder, a recorder or transcriber of calls (a call exists for it once you send something afterwards: the voice note you record in the app, the note you type, or a notetaker's summary pasted into a note), or a connection to a CRM, Outlook or any system in the list above. It does not hold the deliverable; the deck stays wherever you build it. Two cautions before client material goes in. Everyone on a CC'd thread can see the address, so forward where that matters. And what you send, with the calendar snapshot if you allow it, is processed by the outside providers listed on our AI disclosure page so that it can be searched and answered from; put that page in front of your firm's policy before you start.

Built for client-confidential work

When your inbox holds signed NDAs and seven confidential relationships, an assistant that wants to connect to your whole inbox is a hard sell. Equerry works the other way: you decide what it sees by forwarding or CC-ing specific threads. It's the same reason Equerry suits client-facing executives more broadly; for the prep itself, see AI meeting prep, and for the habit of keeping several engagements straight with or without an app, how to keep track of multiple clients.

Sources, all read 6 November 2026. Dollar prices are from each maker's US page or US App Store listing; Google, Gamma and Grammarly price in euros on the pages read and those are given as euros, unconverted. OpenAI, ChatGPT plans and pricing, What is ChatGPT Plus?, Projects in ChatGPT, Memory in ChatGPT, Data controls in ChatGPT and Enterprise privacy. Anthropic, Claude pricing. Google, Gemini subscriptions, Gemini Notebook and its sign-in page. Microsoft, Microsoft Copilot for Business. Perplexity, App Store listing. Beautiful.ai, pricing. Gamma, plans and pricing. Plus AI, pricing. Fireflies, pricing. Granola, home page and pricing. Otter, pricing. Julius, pricing. Grammarly, plans. Mem, pricing. Superhuman, Superhuman Mail pricing. Makers change their products and prices often; where a maker's current page disagrees with this one, the maker's page is right. Equerry is not affiliated with any of these makers.

Last updated 2026-11-06.

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