Consulting firms aren’t paid for advice, they’re paid to provide cover, enable, and validate something management already wants to do. If something goes sideways, they take the heat instead of the CEO. “McKinsey said it was a good idea to try!”

The fact that AI which is legendarily unreliable and inaccurate despite all the hype is still good enough to replace many of these consultants shows just how much of a scam their industry is. Good riddance.

They don't consult, they are paid enablers, they tell you what you want to hear to feel good.

Now that realistic token prices have been introduced,
many of these breakaway consulting firms that are relying on AI,
will quietly become unaffordable and disappear too.
The $20 a month AI subscription was the gateway drug to get the corporations hooked.

I won't miss them. During my career I've seen some consulting firms presenting their "good" advice to the management. Although some points read well on paper, most didn't survive the practice test. I've hardly any suggestion seen that survived longer than a year.

When I interviewed for a company in US, I got hired even after I told the CEO that I do not fully understand their business. He said I am tired of consultants pretending to know things and telling me what to do instead of listening to what I need. It will take me one year to make you learn what we do, but at least 3 years to make the others unlearn what they know. And we built the entire platform for them. I got hired not for what I knew but because I was an empty cup. Talks a lot about consultants!

The majority of consultants are just pretending and businesses want to feel good. Plus the revolving door model. Consultants and HR are mainly a jobs program. Shouldn’t exist.

The biggest limitation with AI right now is not that it can't do the work. It's that most people either don't review the output properly or don't know enough to review it properly.

If you don't understand part of an AI-generated output, the obvious solution is to ask the AI to explain it and learn the missing concepts. But most people don't do that. Some are lazy, and others simply don't have the time. So instead of learning how to use AI properly and validate the work, they outsource it to consultants.

That's one reason consulting still has plenty of work despite AI becoming extremely capable.

I see the same problem internally. I had to restrict my staff from using AI for final outputs because the quality was terrible. I let them use it for analysis, but I make them do the rest manually.

The strange part is that AI can already replace a lot of junior-level work for me personally. I know how to review its output, identify mistakes, give it corrections, and get a revised answer almost immediately.

With junior staff, I often have to spend far more time explaining what is wrong, why it is wrong, and what knowledge they are missing.

AI's biggest weakness is usually not lack of knowledge. It's judgment, context, and common sense.

It can produce something technically sophisticated while also including statements that are obviously irrelevant or inappropriate for the specific situation. The problem is that many people don't catch those mistakes. I've had team members only realize how ridiculous an AI-generated point was after I explicitly pointed it out.

Clients do the same thing. They generate outputs, barely review them, submit them to regulators, and then get destroyed because the work contains obvious errors.

So a competent human reviewer is still essential.

The other major problem is context. Most people give AI far too little information. They provide a few basic facts, ask for an output, and then blame the model when the result is poor.

For serious projects, I can spend around 45 minutes just setting up the initial prompt, explaining the project, defining the workflow, providing the necessary context, and structuring how I want the AI to work with me. After that, I use it as a continuous assistant throughout the project.

Most people, whether clients or consultants, put nowhere near that much thought into how they use AI.

That's why the point in the video about managers needing fewer junior staff is absolutely true.

For me, a weak junior is often more work than AI. With AI, I review the output, point out the mistake, and it fixes it. With a junior, I may need to explain the mistake, teach the missing concept, review the revised work, and repeat the process.

That doesn't mean consulting is about to disappear.

For that to happen, AI would need to solve two major problems: understanding all the relevant context and making consistently good judgment calls.

Even then, someone would probably still need to review the final output unless AI reaches the point where serious mistakes become extremely rare.

What is much more likely is that the consulting industry shrinks, especially at the junior level.

I don't see how average junior consultants compete with AI unless they are unusually capable and become extremely good at using it.

The BCG research mentioned in the video points in the same direction. A lot of people are simply bad at using AI. They don't understand what it can and cannot do, and they don't experiment enough to learn where it works well and where it fails.

AI is already incredibly powerful. The real bottleneck is that most people still don't know how to use it properly.

This video misses one important point. Middle managers are already heavily loaded - most of the work coordinating analysts and talking to clients during whole projects falls on them. If you take their analysts away, even with the help of GPT tools, their work will become even harder. This will lead to turnover, which will ultimately affect the quality of consulting. Trust me from experience - Partners usually do NOTHING on projects except for a final read, minor edits (they cannot do more because they simply do not know the project), and of course signing off on it. The greatest impact of the work hits middle managers.

"Consultant" is the new "content creator". Content creator is the new consultant.

What an amazing title for the video. So apt and true! Kudos and well done! it is so satisfying!

" A management consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you the time, and then charges you for a time zone analysis."

Calling Consulting a Scam is a strong word to be fair, Its like calling buying a Ferrari a scam when you work a regular 9 to 5.

It simply wasn't meant for you! And there's nothing wrong with having one when your increased perceived status opens doors to even more wealth!


No industry survives without someone willing to pay and nobody pays when it isn't worth the hassle. Its basic economics. This is just an economic reaction to market changes and when the bubble bursts (as it will at least eventually) we will be left somewhere in the middle of either somewhat stability or uber capitalist decay.

In several countries out of USA the firms are already closing. The end is near...

Eagerly awaiting AI to pare down the Management Ranks.

Let's also remember that consultants routinely offered terrible advice that looked good on paper and lead to increase in profits in the short term only to turn around and hollow out the company in the long term.
AI in the mix is likely to yield the same results. Fuckups that would have initially been due to shortsighted analysis will now be due to AI screwups.
Consultants never provided a good service. IT provided an excuse. When the CEO has to make a decision he can point to a consultancy firm to cover his ass. Even stock options is not a good solution unless the stock options come with really long time horizons. Something like 10 or 20 years.

Consulting otherwise known as fill in the blank on the powespoint  deck.

Anything LLMs can do is probably an activity thay didnt need doing anyway.

Why would someone not doing a job know more about it thatn the people there? Probably because the people at the top use to be consultants themselves.

Why contract with a middle man to do the promting? You can get the same answer yourself directly. They must have scrapped enough McKenzie reports off the web to generate one for you.

Consultants? Charge $$$$$ in discovery mode to determine what a process or transaction looks like then gives you a report. The problem is, they run around bothering all your employees, meeting after meeting, interviews, trying to find out what it is that you do. The employees already know, but they must teach these consultants enough so they can be mildly effective at suggesting a solution. Big $$$$$ and you get a powerpoint. You could have reached the same conclusion in a couple internal meetings.

It's so very much alive. They never lose. I've seen it again and again. They. Never. Lose.

I never gave much time and thought to these audit "consultants", just gave them much of the basic information and b.s. the rest. They did not understand much of what we were doing anyway and put out reports and presentations with high phrases and buzzwords..
Just sat in the presentations, clapped at the end and forgot about them until the next year..