There’s a stat that gets passed around in consulting circles that sounds absurd until you actually sit with it.
The average analyst or associate at a strategy consulting firm spends roughly 15 to 20 hours a week on slide work. Not on research. Not on financial modeling. Not on client communication. On building, formatting, and iterating on PowerPoint decks.
That’s nearly half a working week. Every week.
We interviewed a dozen consultants across MBB, Big 4, and independent firms while building Folio. One senior manager at a top-three firm put it plainly: “I spend 40% of my time on slides. Maybe 10% of that is actually thinking. The rest is formatting.”
So how did we get here?
The consulting deck is a communication format with no equal
In consulting, the slide deck is the deliverable. Not a report, not a memo. A deck. It communicates a recommendation to a C-suite audience in 30 minutes. It has to be precise, visually consistent, and able to withstand scrutiny from a partner who has seen tens of thousands of slides.
That standard is not going away. Clients pay for it. Firms compete on it. New analysts spend their first year learning it.
The problem is not the format. The problem is the production process.
Why slide production takes so long
Top consulting firms have elaborate PowerPoint templates: custom fonts, locked color palettes, multiple slide masters, 20+ pre-built layouts. These templates encode the firm’s visual identity and ensure consistency across hundreds of consultants. They’re also brittle. Copy a slide from one deck to another and the formatting breaks. Paste text from Word and the font changes. Resize a shape and the alignment shifts. Every consultant has spent hours fixing problems that shouldn’t exist.
Iteration compounds the problem. A typical engagement involves multiple rounds of feedback: from the engagement manager, from the partner, from the client. Each round means going back to slides that were considered done and reworking them. Sometimes it’s a content change. More often it’s structural: “flip the narrative on slides 8 through 12”, “make this a two-column layout”, “add a chart here”. These changes are easy to describe and slow to execute.
Layered on top of that is the structural model most firms use. Senior consultants define the story. Junior analysts build the slides. In theory this is efficient. In practice, it means the people with the least context spend the most time on production. The analyst learns the content as they build the deck, which has real value. But they also spend hours on formatting that has no learning value: aligning boxes, matching font sizes, making a table look exactly right.
The tooling has never solved this. Think-Cell and Efficient Elements help with specific tasks - charts, formatting shortcuts - but they don’t address the core bottleneck: taking a written instruction and translating it into slide edits. That gap has always been filled by human time.
What this actually costs
Let’s be conservative. 15 hours a week on slide work, at an average fully-loaded cost of $150 per hour for a junior consultant. That’s $2,250 per week per person. $117,000 per year.
For a team of 10, that’s $1.17M per year in slide production costs.
Even if half of that is unavoidable - the thinking, the structuring, the judgment calls - the formatting and iteration overhead alone represents hundreds of thousands of dollars per team per year.
This is not a productivity curiosity. It’s a business problem.
What’s changing
AI tools have started to address this, but most of them are solving the wrong problem. Generating a new deck from scratch is useful occasionally. Editing the deck you already have, built on your firm’s template, is useful every single day.
Most AI slide tools ignore this distinction. They produce output that has to be reformatted, re-templated, and manually reconciled with existing work. That shifts the labor rather than reducing it.
The tools that will actually change the ratio are the ones that work inside the file you already have - reading your slide masters, understanding your layouts, and making edits that don’t require cleanup afterward. That’s a harder engineering problem. It’s also the only one worth solving.
The gap between where AI slide tooling is today and where it needs to be is narrower than it looks.
