A client recently gave me a call about a pitch he received from a “business consulting group that was incorporating AI into a free analysis about the business.” Which, in practice, essentially means copy and pasting several paragraphs from a company’s website, plugging it into ChatGPT or Gemini, and generating the subsequent report. Some of these “free analyses” go the extra mile by even making some very slight, incidental changes to personalize the report! Either way the end outcome is the same; regurgitated AI slop without any real content or the expertise of an actual human. It’s the exact same approach as a “security analysis” by just plugging a website URL into VirusTotal.
I had an enjoyable discussion with the client about these sorts of pitches and how often they’re deliberately intended to provoke an emotional response from business owners who want instant answers from a “new” technology they don’t fully understand (since generative AI itself is not new). It also got me thinking about the role of these “consultants” who are slapping “AI” onto their names after taking an evening webinar about “prompt engineering.”
“AI will replace/is replacing jobs!” is practically the slogan of AI boosters. It’s not hard to find many, many, many examples of wild, audacious claims that 80%, 90%, or even every single job will be replaced by AI. Yet what I’ve noticed is that despite doing very similar white collar work to the designers, developers, programmers, account managers, graphic designers, or customer service representatives, they have a curious habit of inoculating themselves from this great job replacement and asserting their jobs alone are essential.
Yet this becomes the fatal paradox that no AI consultant or booster wants to actually answer.
We’re told on a daily basis that ChatGPT and other AI agents are infallible. They can do anything. They have unlimited potential. They can literally replace entire jobs, with all the nuance, analysis, creativity and critical thinking that human beings bring to the table (except when they’re not infallible, but more on that in a minute). Sam Altman even said on Jimmy Fallon’s show recently that ChatGPT could unlock the mysteries of the universe…however that would work.
If all of that’s true, AI consultants and prompt engineers, what do we need you for?
I’m serious.
If you genuinely believe that AI brings such immense value to the table that it can eliminate entire jobs, put your money where your mouth is:
Replace your own job with an AI prompt that gives someone an instant “AI consultant” through ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever the agent in question is.
This should, according to AI boosters’ internal logic, be one of the easiest industries to replace. “AI consulting” largely boils down to telling people to use AI, copy/pasting ChatGPT outputs, and articulating verbiage in a specific way that will “improve” the output of AI itself. All of this could easily be replicated far more than any designer, developer, programmer, account manager, customer service representative or even marketer (despite my own axe to grind against the marketing industry).
Once the “AI consultant” in question gets tasked with living up to the ideals they themselves are selling to people, they have one of two options. The first is to agree to replace their own jobs with AI prompts – which they’ll never do, because they’ll unwittingly expose how their job is far less “essential” than many others.
The second option is to use one of several justifications for their own roles that are very easy to debunk according to their own internal logic:
“Well, my job requires human oversight!”
Congratulations, AI consultants: You’ve just described why a lot of jobs aren’t actually being replaced despite your own marketing on the subject.
There is not a single professional role that does not require or benefit from human oversight. Programming, writing, graphic design, marketing, customer service, account management, business development, and yes, even leadership roles – these functions are all made objectively worse absent human behavior.
AI consultant can’t say that AI will replace an entire industry while also insulating
“AI isn’t perfect yet!”
So let me get this straight: The entire pitch that AI can make your money for you, replace jobs and industries, and even run your business on your behalf isn’t perfect? Beyond the obvious contradiction at play, why are AI consultants selling an imperfect technology that’s just three years old as a replacement for human labor? I don’t ever install plugins on client websites that aren’t thoroughly tested, vetted and checked for compatibility issues. Yet we’re expected to believe that entire businesses and livelihoods can run off the back of technology AI consultants say is genius-level technology, except it isn’t?
Either the technology is so high-level that it’s capable of all of this, or it isn’t perfect “yet”, in which case it isn’t. You can’t have it both ways and move the goalposts depending on the situation. Nor is it acceptable to say “Well, it will be perfect eventually!” If that’s the case, AI consultants are turning their own clients into glorified beta testers for Big Tech and charging them for it, which raises a lot of ethical concerns.
This statement is also a glorified tech equivalent of “never say never.” Yes, a lot of things haven’t happened “yet.” It also doesn’t mean that they actually will; it just provides the cloak of plausible deniability when you can’t demonstrate actionable numbers of results. I could fly to the moon for breakfast tomorrow morning. It hasn’t happened “yet” but it might!
Both of these reasons hint at the core issue, which is that AI consultants are not selling AI as a technology. They’re selling FOMO and fear, and they know who they’re selling it to. They’re selling all of this to businesses in a tight market being desperate for answers, executives trying to avoid missing out on an opportunity (or find a way to cut costs), and tech investors desperately hunting for the next PC or smartphone revolution. Most tellingly, they’re selling to people who still treat AI as a genie in a bottle rather than the scraping and regurgitation it really is.
At its most basic level, AI is nothing more than a better-financed tech bubble that we’ve seen a hundred times over. We’ve seenthis come and go with social media gurus in the 2010s, crypto/NFT “thought leaders” from the late 2010s until 2022, the metaverse “experts” for the metaverse nobody wanted, and the Web3 “strategists” for a Web3 that nobody even remembers anymore. Don’t take my word for it – scroll through of these peoples’ timelines on Twitter or LinkedIn. Watch as, going backwards, they go from talking about AI, to the metaverse and Web3, to NFTs. It’s actually uncanny.
It’s also why that if AI could genuinely replace anyone, it would be replacing the people at the ground level hawking it. The job of “advising businesses on AI” is far easier to automate than the professions “AI consultants” or just business consultants putting the cart before the horse with AI claim to be replacing. You don’t need to pay someone a ridiculous hourly premium to hear talk of “Integration of AI into your content pipeline.” ChatGPT is absolutely capable of giving you this fortune cookie business advice.
The real reason that AI consultants aren’t already being replaced (and won’t replace themselves) is simple. They already know that AI isn’t a job replacement. It’s a tool, and like any tool, it’s only as useful as the skill of the person using it. AI consultants are the ones producing slides, “prompt strategies”, vague strategy sessions, and buzzwords. Ultimately, if AI could replace anyone, it would replace these AI consultants first.
It’s why they cling to the loophole of “Oh, AI is replacing tons of jobs but not us, we prompt engineers and AI specialists are immune to it!”
Nope. They’re not on the “vanguard of an AI revolution.” These are people saw several Forbes articles about how “essential” AI was becoming, quickly jumped on a few webinars to learn what ChatGPT was, and started adding AI services into their website copy.
It’s why they’ll never follow through on their own advice – because they would either make their own jobs obsolete, or admit that they can’t actually do that.
Businesses don’t need hype or empty promises about the new AI economy. They need people to solve problems, get them results, save them money and make them money.
That’s how you’ll still be around in five years once all of these “AI companies” are dead.