Career Evolution
From PeopleSoft to AI: The Evolution of the Functional Consultant
How the functional consultant’s ability to translate between operations and technology becomes even more valuable in the AI era.
Translation has always been the work.
A functional consultant lives between two worlds: the way a business operates and the way a system must be configured to support it. That role requires more than product knowledge. It requires listening, pattern recognition, judgment and the ability to make complexity understandable.
AI expands the toolset, but it does not replace that bridge. Organizations still need people who can separate a surface request from the underlying operational need.
The next chapter is orchestration.
As automation and AI become part of everyday workflows, the functional role grows from configuring transactions to shaping how information, decisions and human review move across a business.
The opportunity is not to abandon decades of enterprise knowledge. It is to apply that knowledge to a new generation of tools—with the same care for controls, adoption and outcomes.