Startup Rocket offers McKinsey-style AI consulting at a fraction of the usual cost

Indian startup Rocket has launched an AI platform that positions itself as an affordable alternative to expensive strategic consulting. Rather than limiting itself to code generation, the new product combines three directions: strategic analysis, product development, and competitive intelligence. Over the past years, the market for AI tools for business has grown exponentially, but most solutions have focused on narrow tasks — code writing, text generation, or process automation.

Rocket is betting on something different: the platform should think at the level of a senior McKinsey consultant, analyzing market trends, competitive landscape, and strategic alternatives. The startup founders, coming from the Indian tech ecosystem, position their solution as "vibe consulting" — a reference to the term "vibe coding," which describes AI-assisted development without deep immersion into technical details. Now, however, the focus is not on code but on strategy: the user describes a business problem, and the AI prepares a structured report with recommendations — in the style of consulting slides that top executives of large companies are accustomed to.

The cost of consulting services from companies like McKinsey, BCG, or Bain can reach several million dollars per project. Rocket offers a comparable result in form for several hundred dollars per month or less. The target audience is startups, mid-market companies, and corporate teams that need quick analytics but cannot afford a full-fledged consulting contract.

Competitive intelligence is one of the key modules of the platform. The system automatically collects data about competitors, analyzes their positioning, and creates comparative matrices. What usually takes an analytical team weeks, Rocket promises to do in hours.

In parallel, a product planning module is being developed: AI helps formulate strategy, prioritize the backlog, and describe user scenarios without expensive consultants. The market for such solutions is still being formed, and Rocket has obvious competitors — from general AI assistants like ChatGPT to more specialized strategic analysis tools. However, the bet on a consulting output format — structured reports, presentations, analytical frameworks — may prove to be exactly what is needed: many executives need not just an answer but a document that can be shown to the board of directors.

The emergence of such platforms calls into question the long-term business model of classical consulting. If AI can prepare market analysis in a few hours that a consultant takes three weeks to do, the value of human expertise shifts: from data collection and structuring to interpretation, decision-making, and client relationship management. For startups and small teams, this opens access to tools that were once the monopoly of large corporations.