How CMI Strategies achieved 95% AI adoption across 100 Consultants with Dust

This story was written by Wesype, a Dust Platinum Partner with strong expertise in the consulting industry. It shows how CMI Strategies unified its AI approach to boost productivity and achieve measurable ROI. With Wesype’s support, the firm deployed Dust across the organization, reaching a 95% adoption rate and cutting time spent on key consulting tasks by half.

About CMI Strategies

Monday morning reality check: three consultants at the same firm are using three different AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) for similar market research tasks. Each produces different quality outputs, knowledge sharing becomes impossible, and the firm can't build systematic AI capabilities.

This was CMI Strategies before their transformation.

CMI Strategies is a 100-person strategic consulting firm operating across three equal business segments: investment fund advisory (due diligence and transaction support), corporate strategy consulting (technology, healthcare, industrial, financial services), and public sector transformation (ministries, regional authorities, universities, healthcare institutions).

Like most consulting firms, they operate on a time-based revenue model where productivity and deliverable quality directly impact profitability. But unlike most firms, they recognized that scattered AI experimentation was creating more problems than solutions and decided to do something systematic about it.

Challenge: When scattered AI experimentation hurts more than it helps

Strategic consulting faces a productivity paradox: success means processing more complex information faster, yet client expectations for speed and insight continue rising. For CMI Strategies, this challenge was amplified by fragmented AI adoption creating inconsistent deliverable quality.

The Copilot Letdown and Fragmentation Problem

As a Microsoft 365 organization, CMI Strategies naturally tried Copilot first. The results were not optimal and so individual consultants began experimenting independently with different AI models:

• Research quality varied dramatically depending on which consultant used which tool
• Knowledge sharing became impossible across different AI platforms (ChatGPT, Copilot …)
• No systematic approach to common consulting challenges

Core Operational Bottlenecks

Research consuming analytical bandwidth: Research represents 50% of consulting work, but traditional methods were inefficient. Understanding complex sectors required hours of manual research that should have been spent on strategic analysis.

Time-intensive deliverable creation: Commercial proposals required 4-5 hours of senior consultant time for semi-standardized 7-8 page documents. Executive summaries from 120-200 slide deal documents consumed full days of analytical resources.

Manual qualitative analysis: Customer reviews, expert interviews, and competitive intelligence required completely manual analysis, missing patterns and consuming valuable consultant time.

"We sell time, so we need both productivity and quality improvements. The question wasn't whether to use AI, it was how to do it systematically rather than having everyone experiment independently." Bastien Hontebeyrie, Principal, CMI Strategies

Solution: Systematic AI deployment with specialized agents

Instead of continuing fragmented experimentation, CMI Strategies needed unified AI capabilities that could leverage different models while building systematic automation for recurring tasks.

Why Dust won the evaluation:

• Model flexibility: Access to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models through one platform, ending fragmented experimentation
• Intuitive adoption: Simple interface enabling rapid deployment without extensive training
• Agent automation: Ability to create specialized agents for recurring consulting tasks

Phased Deployment Strategy

Phase 1: Proof of Concept (5-6 consultants) Tested core functionality and developed initial use cases, creating internal advocates who could demonstrate practical value.

Phase 2: Vertical Expansion (Investment Fund Division) Rolled out across one-third of the business to validate ROI with standardized processes before company-wide scaling. The firm organized internal hackathons specifically for this division to crowdsource the most interesting and impactful use cases, accelerating agent development through collective innovation.

Phase 3: Organization-wide (100 consultants) Achieved 95% adoption across all three business verticals with 30+ specialized agents.

Systematic Training and Support Infrastructure

CMI Strategies integrated AI capabilities directly into their organizational DNA rather than treating it as an add-on tool. New consultants receive 2 hours of Dust training as part of their standard week-long onboarding program, ensuring every team member starts with systematic AI capabilities from day one.

The firm established a Teams channel for ongoing Dust support, but it sees only a few questions per week—a strong indicator of the platform's intuitive design and successful adoption. This minimal support requirement demonstrates that when AI tools are properly selected and deployed, they become as natural as using email or spreadsheets.

30+ Agents Solving Specific Consulting Challenges

Rather than general AI interaction, CMI Strategies built specialized agents for recurring workflows:

Research and Market Intelligence: Multi-model analysis enables consultants to achieve sector literacy in minutes rather than hours. Complex domains like AB testing software can be understood deeply enough for strategic analysis quickly, freeing time for insight generation.

Commercial Proposal Automation Specialized agents handle 5-6 standard proposal sections automatically while providing structured first drafts for client-specific content. Result: 60-70% time reduction from 4-5 hours to 2 hours per proposal.

Executive Summary Generation AI agents process extensive deal documentation and generate analyst-quality executive summaries, reducing production time by 50% while eliminating the blank page syndrome.

Advanced Qualitative Data Analysis: The firm's approach to qualitative data transformation showcases AI's pattern recognition capabilities. Agents can analyze up to 13,000+ customer reviews from platforms like Trustpilot, identifying trends that would be impossible to spot manually. For example, tracking pricing concern evolution—15% of reviews in 2021, 8% in 2022, 23% in 2023—reveals strategic insights about competitive dynamics and market positioning that inform client recommendations.

Expert Interview Intelligence: CMI Strategies processes hundreds of pages of expert interview transcripts using their citation creator agent. This tool maintains proper attribution while identifying patterns across multiple interviews, transforming qualitative insights into structured strategic intelligence. The agent can extract compelling quotes organized by themes like pricing positioning, functional coverage, or innovation strategies, eliminating manual transcript analysis while ensuring analytical accuracy.

"We can now identify patterns impossible to spot manually. When pricing concerns shift across years in customer reviews, that tells a strategic story about competitive dynamics that informs our recommendations." Bastien Hontebeyrie, Principal, CMI Strategies

Results: Universal adoption with measurable ROI

CMI Strategies achieved 95% adoption across 100 consultants while delivering quantifiable productivity gains and enhanced deliverable quality.

Quantified Impact

Productivity transformation:

• Commercial proposals: 60-70% time savings (4-5 hours → 2 hours) with improved consistency
• Executive summaries: 50% faster production while eliminating analytical paralysis
• Research efficiency: Sector literacy achieved in minutes rather than hours

Adoption success:

• 95% utilization across all age demographics without extensive training
• Only holdouts: Few senior partners near retirement preferring traditional methods
• Organic momentum: Internal advocates drove adoption more effectively than mandates

Quality improvements:

• Enhanced analytical depth: Time savings from routine tasks enables more thorough client-specific analysis
• Pattern recognition: AI identifies insights missed in manual analysis
• Consistency gains: Standardized deliverable quality across different consultants

ROI and Competitive Impact

Straightforward economics: Monthly costs of 30-40 euros per consultant generate multiple hours of weekly time savings, creating obvious ROI before considering quality improvements and job satisfaction gains from eliminating routine work.

Client relationship transformation: The firm's AI capabilities have become a source of competitive differentiation and new business opportunities. Clients increasingly ask CMI Strategies how they use AI, creating advisory opportunities beyond traditional strategic consulting engagements. This positions the firm as a forward-thinking partner that can guide other organizations through their own AI transformation journeys.

However, this evolution also creates new competitive pressures. Clients are starting to arrive at meetings already AI-educated, having done their own preliminary research using AI tools. This forces CMI Strategies to deliver more sophisticated analysis and deeper insights to justify their value proposition, a challenge they've successfully met by using AI to enhance rather than replace human analytical capabilities.

Maintained pricing power: Productivity gains translate to improved value delivery rather than price pressure, enabling the firm to deliver higher quality analysis at existing rates while improving consultant job satisfaction by eliminating tedious tasks.

"We've become augmented consultants delivering higher quality analysis and faster turnaround while maintaining pricing. The ROI is excellent—even saving a few hours per week per consultant justifies the investment." Bastien Hontebeyrie, Principal, CMI Strategies

What's next: Office integration and industry transformation

CMI Strategies views their current implementation as the foundation for deeper automation, particularly native Office 365 integration and slide creation capabilities.

Immediate priorities:

• Office 365 integration: Native PowerPoint and Excel access will eliminate platform switching friction (good news : this is on Dust roadmap!)
• Slide automation: Junior analysts spend 50% of their time on slide creation
• Advanced analytics: Enhanced Excel capabilities for sophisticated data analysis

Organizational Structure Evolution

The firm is actively questioning how AI will reshape traditional consulting structures. They're considering whether to create a dedicated "prompting engineer" position—someone who would be an expert in AI tools and help create and maintain agents across the firm. This specialized role could potentially enable the firm to operate with different analyst-to-partner ratios while maintaining or improving deliverable quality.

These organizational questions extend to recruitment and team composition over the next 18 months. If AI can handle significant portions of routine analytical work, how should consulting firms structure their teams? What skills become more valuable? How do career progression paths evolve in an AI-augmented environment?

The ROI is so compelling that universal consulting industry adoption appears inevitable. This will elevate the entire industry by forcing competition on strategic insight rather than information gathering, as clients arrive with their own AI-powered research. Firms that don't adopt systematic AI capabilities risk being left behind as both competitors and clients become more sophisticated in their AI usage.

Implementation roadmap for consulting firms

Based on achieving 95% adoption across 100 consultants, here's what works:

Unified Platforms Over Fragmented Experimentation

✅ Do this: Implement platforms providing model flexibility while maintaining consistency

❌ Avoid this: Individual consultant experimentation with different tools

Phased Deployment with Internal Advocates

✅ Do this: Start small, create advocates, validate ROI, then scale

❌ Avoid this: Company-wide rollouts without proven value

Agent Automation Over General AI

✅ Do this: Build specialized agents for recurring, time-intensive tasks

❌ Avoid this: Relying solely on general-purpose AI interaction

Integration Over Innovation

✅ Do this: Enhance existing workflows seamlessly

❌ Avoid this: Forcing consultants to adopt entirely new processes

"Systematic AI adoption enhances consultant capabilities while maintaining human judgment central to consulting success. The future belongs to firms that can systematically leverage AI for competitive advantage." Bastien Hontebeyrie, Principal, CMI Strategies

The question for consulting firms isn't whether to adopt AI, it's how quickly they can implement systematic capabilities before competitors gain similar advantages.