Synthiz for consultants

The problem: selling expertise you have one week to acquire

Consulting runs on an uncomfortable gap: the client buys sector expertise, the engagement starts Monday, and the sector is new to you. Three days to talk about pharmaceutical distribution or energy tariff design like someone who has lived in it for a decade.

The material exists, and it is public: market studies, regulator reports, analyst notes, vendor webinars, industry podcasts, trade press. The problem is not scarcity but throughput: nobody absorbs 400 pages and six hours of conference audio over a weekend while keeping track of who said what.

The second problem is more expensive at firm scale: nothing compounds. The understanding you built leaves in a deck filed on SharePoint, or nowhere at all, and six months later someone repeats the same work for a neighbouring client. Notion and Confluence store deliverables, not the understanding that produced them.

The workflow with Synthiz

1. Open a memoire at kickoff, named by sector rather than by client: "B2B food distribution" compounds better than "ACME phase 2".
2. Load the framing corpus: sector reports in PDF, trade press by link, webinars and panels as video, analyst podcasts. The Chrome extension saves the open page in one click and captures YouTube transcripts when needed — an hour-long webinar enters your base while you watch it.
3. Search from the extension, mid-call. A speaker cites a figure you believe you have already read: the search panel queries your base without leaving the tab and shows the excerpt around the term. The answer is on screen, with no results list to work through.
4. Subscribe to the structuring feeds: the regulator's RSS, the trade show's YouTube channel, the reference podcast. Sync is automatic — hourly, every six hours or daily — and content arrives already processed.
5. Read summaries to map the terrain, not to memorise everything: the sector's vocabulary, the players in the room, the figures that keep recurring.
6. Use the cross-analysis on contradictory sources. That is where deliverable substance lives: two firms projecting opposite growth, a blind spot an entire sector shares — often the core of a recommendation.
7. Write thoughts as you go — a diagnostic hypothesis, a question for the steering committee, a contradiction to check — each anchored to the sources behind it.
8. Verify before a figure goes into a slide. Timestamped citations take you back to the exact passage: one click tells you whether the source really says what the summary drew from it.
9. Export to Markdown or PDF into your framing note or your deck.

Finding the figure you saw three months ago

The steering committee is in forty minutes and one reference is missing. You are certain you read an order of magnitude on sector margin — in a study, a webinar or an analyst note, impossible to say which, and the document's exact wording escapes you.

This is the classic second-brain failure. Obsidian, a Zettelkasten, a well-kept Notion are excellent at making you think and linking ideas. Their weak point is retrieval: finding the source of an idea three engagements later means recalling the vocabulary of the time, or having maintained a tag taxonomy — which is not what someone changing sector every quarter does.

Synthiz keeps the linking and treats retrieval as a distinct problem. Search combines a semantic layer, which finds a passage by meaning without requiring the document's words, and a full-text lexical layer for acronyms, company names and numeric values; the two scores are fused. Relevance does not rest on a fixed threshold but on a document's distance from the distribution of its own query, plus an absolute floor. So you find the right study by describing the idea in your own words, and when the corpus contains nothing, the search returns zero rather than three adjacent documents — which stops you sourcing a slide on a document that does not say what you think.

What it changes in practice

Engagement stage	Before	With Synthiz
Sector framing	3 to 5 unbilled days of reading	Corpus worked through, vocabulary acquired faster
One-hour webinar	Rarely watched	Transcribed and summarised automatically
Sourcing a figure in the deck	Retroactive hunt through PDFs	Timestamped citation from the concept
Next engagement, same sector	Starts from zero	Existing memoire to reactivate
Contradictions between studies	Spotted if you are lucky	Surfaced by the cross-analysis

The most tangible benefit is financial: framing time is rarely fully rebillable, and cutting it raises engagement margin without touching the price.

The honest limits

Synthiz does not replace expertise. It compresses the time it takes to reach public information, not the field instincts or the twenty interviews that let a seasoned consultant know where to look. A client notices the difference quickly.

It is not a team tool. No firm-wide shared library, no per-engagement permissions, no roles: compounding is individual. A knowledge base shared across consultants needs something else.

Client confidentiality is your responsibility. Content is processed by third-party AI services: a public report raises no question, data covered by an NDA depends on what you signed.

It is not a deliverable production tool. No deck templates, no layout, no slide generation: Synthiz stops at the material and you export into PowerPoint.

It is not a quantitative analysis tool. Building a business plan or restating accounts remains Excel's job: Synthiz handles text, audio and video, not spreadsheets.

Quality depends on the corpus. In a sector with little public documentation, where knowledge travels through interviews, the tool contributes little.