An enterprise operating system for footprint, location and workforce advisory — built by management consultants, for management consultants. It's here to help your team do more, and do it better: upskilling and augmenting the analysts you already have, never replacing them. Sourced, labelled, and shown in plain English — not another chatbot guessing in the dark.
The Stonefield Executive Summary — the full story of what this is and why it exists.
Most firms are stuck between two bad options: ignore AI and fall behind, or restructure the model that pays the bills to chase it.
of AI spend duplicates tools the firm already pays for — nobody's tracking why.
HelpNetSecurity, shadow AI spend research
of enterprises show no measurable earnings impact, despite record AI spend.
McKinsey 2026 survey, 1,719 executives
Almost all of that spend is aimed inward — making the back office faster. Very little of it is aimed at winning the next client. And the real fear isn't AI itself — it's that fixing this means gutting the billable-analyst model that funds the firm.
Same method, every time — sourced, labelled, checkable. Not whoever's turn it is to prompt the chatbot this week.
The philosophy underneath everything we build: if a client can't understand the answer in one read, it's not finished yet. No jargon, no black-box maths — just the logic, said plainly.
Our house rule for AI: every step has a matching manual method sitting behind it. If you ever want to know how a human would've done it by hand, we can show you — and prove both routes land on the same answer.
Every figure on this site has a traceable path back to its source, its transformation, and the rule that produced it — not just a claim, an actual generated trace. Any number, on demand.
We didn't pre-build a flowchart for every figure across all seven tools on the off-chance someone would ask. That's exactly the kind of speculative AI spend we built Stonefield to argue against. Instead, the logic lives as a structured recipe, and the trace is generated live, only when someone actually asks the question — a technical reviewer, a data scientist, you.
Three traces are drawn on the Director's Cut page — stills, so you can see what one looks like. The live version, where any figure in any tool draws itself the moment you ask, runs inside our own tooling and can't sit on a web page. We'd rather show you than claim it: see the stills, then book a session and pick any number. The logic framework does the thinking — 250+ engagements' worth. AI just draws the picture.
Here's what actually happens the week you turn each one on.
You walk into the scoping call already knowing which target accounts show real distress signals, and how confident to be about each one — not a hunch, a sourced score.
Real labour cost and regional data, Europe and the US, side by side. Move the client's own priorities live and watch the ranking change in front of them.
A six-month, two-consultant skills exercise becomes an afternoon's starting point, so your team spends its time on judgement calls, not data-gathering.
A standing monitor watches workforce signals — hiring freezes, union activity, leadership churn — so you're back in the room before the news breaks, not after.
Everything the suite has flagged, rolled up and triaged — answered, partial, or an honest "we don't know yet," never quietly estimated around.
One shared workspace holds everything the suite has produced for a client, so nobody's rebuilding context from six scattered exports.
A sourced, dated company briefing — leadership, structure, strategy, and what's genuinely new in the last year — so nobody's caught flat-footed in the room.
Not a general-purpose AI story. These are the concrete reasons a management consulting firm licenses this — to upskill and augment the team you already have.
Pre-trigger signals surface real opportunities before a competitor's scoping call does — not after the RFP is already out.
Every signal already routes to the right practice line automatically, so BD time goes into the pitch, not the routing.
Your existing team works faster, covers more ground, and gets sharper on the job. Nobody's billable model gets restructured to get there.
One alignment session calibrates the framework to your service lines. No months-long internal build, no new methodology to design.
Reads source material in 10+ European languages directly — no translation step slowing down the first pass.
Starts the discussion with clients on skills, not job titles — exactly the conversation boards are now asking for.
Reaching a real skills starting point on one engagement took two senior consultants six months, full-time, on-site — 233 distinct skills found. That starting point is now an afternoon's work; the interviews and judgement calls stay exactly where they belong, with your consultants.
Basic staffing maths: keeping just one function on call 24/7 takes a minimum of 4.2 full-time people, before sick days or holidays. The suite is on call, across every tool, with no rota required.
Use one, use all seven. From the first footprint signal to the answer your exec team can actually act on, to the briefing before you walk in the room. Click any tool to see what it actually answers.
Key questions it answers: Which of our target accounts is under real pressure right now, and how confident should we be? Is this account fast-moving, rising, steady, or falling — and is it a footprint story worth raising with the client this quarter?
Every score is sourced and flagged with a confidence range, not presented as a bare number, and bucketed by momentum rather than a single static rank — so you know exactly how much weight to put behind it, and how urgently, in the room.
Key questions it answers: Where should this role actually sit — and what does that decision cost, in real labour and regulatory terms, not a rule of thumb? How does one city really compare to another once you strip out the guesswork? And if the client already has one location in mind, what does that single place actually look like, in the round?
Covers Europe, the US, the UK, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East on real official data, never scraped guesses — the specific sources stay behind the scenes, the same way they do for every tool in the suite. Weightings are yours to move — the tool shows the ranking shift live, so the client sees their own priorities driving the answer, not a black box. Want a single-location profile instead of a comparison? That's a different report, not a workaround.
Key questions it answers: Which roles in this business are genuinely AI-augmentable, and which aren't? If we planned around skills instead of job titles, where would we actually need to invest first? Under a conservative, moderate, or aggressive pace of change, what does the next few years actually look like for this workforce?
Runs three automation scenarios — conservative, moderate, aggressive — against the client's own headcount, not an industry-wide guess. Coverage runs across 10+ European languages, screening skills and occupation data at a scale we don't publish the source of, since that mapping is proprietary.
Key questions it answers: Has anything material changed in this client's workforce since we last looked — restructuring, hiring freezes, union activity? Do we need to be back in the room before they call us?
Runs as a standing monitor on the client's own uploaded workforce data — there's no public dataset for this, deliberately, since a company's real risk only shows up once its own data does. A live signal never sits unnoticed for a quarter.
Key questions it answers: Of everything the suite has flagged, what actually needs an executive decision this week? Where can we honestly say "we don't know yet" instead of guessing to fill a slide?
Every answer is labelled answered, partial, or "cannot tell you" — the gap is named, never quietly estimated around. Pulls straight from the Desk's own call sheet, so the exec view and the working view are never telling two different stories.
Key questions it answers: Where does everything the suite has produced for this client actually live, so the next analyst on the account isn't starting from zero? When a signal touches more than one practice line, who else should know?
One record per engagement, shared across the tools — not scattered exports living in scattered inboxes. Pulls a two-page briefing per company on demand, and can draft the coordination email itself when a signal is worth more than one team's attention.
Key questions it answers: What do we need to know about this company before we walk into the room? What's genuinely changed about them in the last year that's worth referencing?
Outside-in snapshots — leadership, structure, strategy — plus dated, practice-line-tagged insights drawn from a rolling 12-month window, each one stating why it was picked and why it matters. No scoring, no ranking — just the context for a sharper conversation.
The logic and frameworks behind each tool don't ship because they seem right. They ship because they survived people whose job is to find the hole in them.
user testing sessions and counting
sectors sense-checked at C-suite level: asset management, private equity, real estate advisory, transaction advisory
every input challenged by external data scientists and industry specialists before it ships
David Osborne — Founder & CTO, Stonefield Advisory
Sixteen years in international consulting, thirteen of them in footprint optimisation. Two hundred and fifty-plus location strategy programmes across 40+ countries and 8 sectors, including co-leading a 50-person European hub at a major human capital advisory firm. Stonefield is that methodology, turned into an enterprise operating system of seven tools — not a generic AI wrapper guessing at what consultants need.
For strategy consulting firms specifically, that means:
location strategy programmes
countries
years in consulting
sectors
The big platforms have depth but move slowly. Generic AI tools move fast but have no methodology underneath. Stonefield sits in neither camp — enterprise-grade rigor, 250+ engagements deep, delivered with the speed and hands-on attention only a boutique can give.
It's the whole pitch, pre-loaded, so the AI has something real to judge instead of guessing.
Real research on AI and consulting work — run against what your own numbers actually look like.
faster, with AI vs. without
Harvard Business School × BCG field study
more efficient on repeatable work — junior staff
BCG 750-person controlled experiment
worse, when AI runs loose on complex work with no review
Same BCG experiment
cheaper reading the source directly instead of translating first
Smartling / Lokalise 2026 data
Want the full picture instead? Book a session and see the live tools yourself.
Not a black box. Not a six-month build. One session and you're live — upskilling the team you already have, not replacing them.
Get in touchIf you're into AI, structured thinking, or just figuring out how the two turn into better business decisions, get in touch. Coffee, a workout, a walk, whatever — happy to talk shop or nothing in particular.
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