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As a consultant, you’re asked to wear a lot of hats: strategist, project manager, risk assessor, financial analyzer, technical expert, optimizer of workflows, manager of expectations, and often, herder of cats. It’s easy to find yourself lacking the bandwidth to give your client a crystal clear, definitive roadmap with all the answers they’re looking for. Fortunately, there’s a hack: enhancing consulting workflows with AI.
Mural AI for consultants is just one of the invaluable tools Mural offers for clarifying client strategy, improving engagement, and optimizing consulting workflows.
If you’re reluctant to embrace AI, we get it — in addition to the daunting experience of handing some of the reins to a “brain” you can’t see, new consulting efficiency tools often have a learning curve that can counterintuitively slow down your process at first. Mural AI is designed to mitigate some of those barriers of entry — data management, results interpretation, user experience, etc. — by seamlessly integrating AI into the Mural you know and love.
Once you’ve adopted AI into your everyday consulting workflows, you’ll find it can improve your efficiency in several ways, including;
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Optimizing resources
- Summarizing complex information
- Breaking through creative roadblocks
- Giving you a bird’s eye view of complicated systems
- Enhancing collaboration
Let’s get into the features of Mural AI and some of the ways it can help with consultant-specific tasks like consulting workflow optimization. You can also use Mural AI for client workshop facilitation and just plain human-to-human communication.
At a high level, Mural features that can help consultants optimize workflows and increase client engagement with AI are:
- Generate: A feature that enables users to generate ideas, questions, hypotheses, opportunity statements, and more from simple, natural language prompts.
- Build a Mural: A feature that enables users to describe their desired activities, outcomes, and/or parameters to have Mural AI automatically build a mural from the appropriate template.
- Mind maps: A feature that enables users to automatically build out mind maps from a word, phrase, or statement using Mural AI.
- Summarize: A feature that automatically creates concise summaries of text in murals.
- Cluster: A feature that creates groups of sticky notes based on content.
- Classify: A feature that enables users to sort sticky notes as positive, negative, or neutral based on their emotional content.
- AI chat: A chat experience where users can interact with Mural AI using natural language prompts.
- AI hub: The centralized hub for accessing Mural’s AI features.
You can learn more about these exciting features and what you can do with them here.
Proposal development with Generate
Use case: When you talk to clients, you can use the Client Insights template to work with them in person to understand what they need. From there, you’ll want to put together an engaging visual presentation to clearly and succinctly address how you’ll help your client move forward.
How Mural AI enhances: Generate is the perfect collaborator to help you gather insights from your initial discovery calls and pull out key messaging. From there, you can use it to structure your proposal, spark ideas, and troubleshoot sticky parts.
Outcome: You save time synthesizing key insights from client calls and build a beautiful proposal your client will go crazy for.
Build custom workshop agendas with Build a Mural
Use case: Congrats! Your client loves your proposal and wants to put it into action. Now it’s time to implement it with a client workshop. First things first: You’ll need to build an agenda to give your client a high-level snapshot and keep the workshop on track. You can grab our simple agenda slides starter kit and customize with your client’s branding.
How Mural AI enhances: Mural AI for consulting workflows can help you avoid time-sucking tasks, like trying to hunt down the perfect agenda template — or heaven forbid, starting one from scratch. With Build a Mural, simply describe what you need and voila! Mural AI will auto-populate your mural with the best agenda template for you.
Outcome: Using AI for strategy workshops can give you a clear agenda with all the information you need to make your client meetings as efficient and productive as possible.
Streamline ideation and brainstorming sessions with Mind Maps and Summarize
Use case: Client workshops should always be collaborative. When it’s time to put nose to grindstone and come up with ideas, solutions, and strategies for optimizing outcomes, Mural can help centralize live or asynchronous ideation sessions with one of Mural’s many brainstorm templates, like this brainstorm and prioritization template.
How Mural AI enhances: Using Mural AI for client alignment can help you get the most out of your brainstorming sessions. Mind Maps can help you follow an idea through to different scenarios, applications, and implementations you may not think of right away. Summarize can then help make any complex, nebulous ideas that may come out of your brainstorm simple and actionable.
Outcome: You’ve improved client engagement, a seamless, productive brainstorm session, and a concise roadmap of ideas for your client to implement with all angles considered.
Competitive analysis with Summarize and Cluster
Use case: Strategies don’t exist in a vacuum. Before your client starts implementing the strategies you’ve brainstormed, you’ll want to take a look at how your client’s business stacks up in a competitive landscape. Mural’s competitive analysis template can help your client analyze what they like about competitors, what they don’t like, what they may want to emulate, and what might be a threat.
How Mural AI enhances: Summarize can take key points from competitive analysis discussions and create neat summaries. From there, Cluster can arrange them into groups to reveal new insights and help you identify patterns or themes among competitors.
Outcome: You and your client can easily see how their business is different from others in the same market. You can also find industry trends that may help your client stand out from the competition.
Develop strategy roadmaps with AI hub
Use case: All that productive brainstorming with your client will hopefully lead you here: a strategy roadmap. This is where you’ll hand off a succinct and concrete strategy to your client, from objectives, to timeline and resources, to KPIs.
How Mural AI enhances: Using AI for strategy workshops is one thing, but when it’s your turn to put everything from your sessions into an actionable roadmap, Mural AI is your best friend. Get all your AI tools in Mural’s AI hub. You can easily create ideas, put together important points, run tests, and make a beautiful roadmap your client can understand and use.
Outcome: You save time building your strategy roadmap, and end up with a compelling, concise, obtainable plan to help your client achieve peak outcomes.
Scenario planning with AI chat
Use case: Even the best thought-out strategy can run into roadblocks if you don’t plan for the right scenarios. As a consultant, part of your job is to anticipate these scenarios and install mitigations so your client doesn’t find themselves up the creek without a paddle. You can use this scenario map template to work through some of these scenarios with your client and identify steps to resolve potential issues.
How Mural AI enhances: Just like any generative AI, Mural AI chat is great at gathering information and predicting an outcome based on certain conditions. As a consultant, you can use AI chat to run different scenarios with your client strategy and find out what might happen under different conditions. You can also use AI chat to help you come up with ways to solve any sticky situations that arise in the different scenarios.
Outcome: You obtain foresight that could help your client avoid tough situations that could put their business at risk.
Root causes in problem analysis with Summarize
Use case: Problems and weaknesses in your client’s business can be complex and multifactorial. When you’re trying to find — and eliminate — problems, redundancies, or bottlenecks in your client’s business plan, a problem tree analysis can help you start to map out and identify upstream causes and downstream effects.
How Mural AI enhances: As stated above, problems can be complex. Gather as much information from your client and relevant team members as possible, and the Summarize feature can help you distill the issue and make complicated problems solvable.
Outcome: You’re able to succinctly identify some of the issues tripping up your client’s business and work together to solve them.
Capture key insights in customer journey mapping with Classify
Use case: Customer insights are critical to your client’s business — if customers feel any negative sentiment at any point in the journey, they’ll be less likely to make it through the funnel, and make retention an uphill battle. Mapping out the customer journey and indicating how the customer feels at each step can help increase conversions and reduce customer service interactions.
How Mural AI enhances: The Classify feature can take key information from consumer insights from each point in the custom journey and automatically sort them into positive, neutral, and negative sentiments. It gives you a crystal clear look into how customers are feeling at each step — and what you can do to increase positive sentiment.
Outcome: Happy customers, increased conversions and retention, reduced customer service encounters for your client.
Optimize process mapping with Cluster
Use case: As a consultant, process mapping (i.e. making flowcharts) can happen at several steps in the process, both to map your client’s current business processes, map out your process solutions, build new workflows for projects, or map out any reorgs that may need to happen as a result of new strategies. Mural’s process flowchart is a great place to start.
How Mural AI enhances: As you move through your process map and make notes about what’s happening at each step, the Cluster feature can group your notes by keywords and content to reveal redundancies or discrepancies in your process that you may have missed.
Outcome: Using AI to optimize workflows can help you build a streamlined process map that reduces redundancies and identifies key inflection points.
Track project deliverables with Summarize
Use case: Consulting workflows will (hopefully) all end at the same place: ingenious deliverables that revolutionize the business. When it comes time to put on your project manager hat and track key deliverables, a mural can help keep everything organized.
How Mural AI enhances: We’ve highlighted some of the myriad ways Mural AI’s Summarize feature can get you out of a forest of minutiae. When it comes to project tracking, Summarize can briefly and concisely tell you what a deliverable is, its objective, who it’s for, and where it’s going — without getting you lost in details that may hold up workflows.
Outcome: A smooth handoff of deliverables, with every project accounted for.
Using AI to optimize workflows can lead to better, more efficient outcomes and less resource drain. Embrace the future of work with Mural AI. Let's innovate, optimize, and grow together!
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