How a senior consultancy turned its partners' tacit knowledge into an asset available to everyone

Mid-2025. A senior consultancy of about 30 people, several decades of expertise in demanding regulated domains. All the firm's value lives where value lives in any senior consultancy: in the heads of the partners and a few seniors. Producing an RFP response: several dozen days. Recurring frustration: seniors spend their time correcting juniors' formatting, juniors do not learn the trade. A first AI mission, given to a generalist provider, had delivered solutions too basic. That is when Catalia was called in.

The bottleneck of senior consultancies

In any senior consultancy, the value of the firm is locked in the heads of the partners. The juniors handle volume. The seniors review and correct. The cycle works, but it does not scale, and it does not transmit. When a partner retires, decades of trade walk out the door.

This 30-person firm in regulated domains lived this acutely. RFP responses took weeks. Seniors burned their time on formatting corrections rather than on substance. Juniors learned the formal layer but not the deep trade.

A first AI mission with a generalist provider had failed. The solutions proposed were too generic — ChatGPT wrappers, off-the-shelf RAGs trained on the firm's PDFs. Not enough trade depth, not enough integration with the actual workflow, no skill transfer to the team.

Catalia proposed a different path: a 4-month mission with an audit phase (what is the trade actually doing, what is the tacit knowledge, where is the value), then a build phase (proprietary trade RAG + visual standardization engine + user training). The goal was not just to ship a tool, but to make the partners' tacit knowledge consultable by every junior, on demand, with trade depth preserved.

Note: The full English version of this case study is being finalized. For the complete content with detailed methodology, results, and lessons learned, refer to the French version.