Why Trust These Gold-Seeking Buffoons of Questionable Expertise?
Overpaid by gullible clients who ought to know better, consultancy firms are now cashing in on work done by non-humans—conventionally called “generative artificial intelligence.” Occupying some kind of purgatorial space of amoral pursuit, these vague, private-sector entities offer services that could (and should) just as easily be performed within government bodies or companies at a fraction of the cost.
Increasingly, a new confidence trick is taking hold: automation using large language models. But first, let’s consider why companies such as McKinsey, Bain & Company, and Boston Consulting Group are the types that should be metaphorically tarred, feathered, and run out of town.
Opaque in their operations and hostile to accountability, the consultancy industry secures lucrative contracts with large corporations and governments that have a Teflon quality. Their selling point is external expertise of a singular quality—a promise that discourages the development of expertise within government officials or business employees.
The other side of the story offers a silly, rosy view from *The Economist*, which claims these companies “make available specialist knowledge that may not exist within some organisations, from deploying cloud computing to assessing climate change’s impact on supply chains.” By performing similar work for many clients, consultants supposedly spread productivity-enhancing practices.
Leaving aside the ghastly, mangled prose, the same paper admits that providing such advice can lead to a “self-protection racket.” For example, CEOs wanting to thin the ranks of employees can rely on favorable assessments from consultants to justify brutal layoffs—consultants are hardly going to recommend preserving jobs.
### The Impact of AI on the Consulting Industry: Two Contrasting Views
The emergence of AI and its effects on the consulting industry generate two main perspectives.
**First**, some insist that automated platforms such as ChatGPT will render traditional consultants obsolete. Travis Kalanick, cofounder of Uber, is a strong proponent of this view. Speaking to Peter Diamandis at the 2025 Abundance Summit, he said:
“If you’re a traditional consultant and you’re just doing the thing, you’re executing the thing, you’re probably in some trouble.”
This statement was qualified by an “operating principle involving the selection of the fittest”:
“If you’re the consultant that puts the things together that replaces the consultant, maybe you got some stuff.”
There is some truth here—junior consultants, tasked with the dreary work of research, modelling, and analysis, could become redundant. Meanwhile, the senior consultants (the “dim sharks” at the apex) dream of strategy roles, even as they coddle their clients with flattering emails automated by software.
**Second**, others see AI as a herald of efficiency, sharpening a consultant’s ostensible worth. Anshuman Sengar, senior partner at Kearney, praises the technology in an interview with the *Australian Financial Review*. Generative AI tools “save me up to 10 to 20 percent of my time.” Since he cannot attend every meeting or read every article, AI has “increased” the relevance of his coverage by generating crisp summaries of meetings and webinars.
Sengar notes accuracy isn’t an issue because “the input data is your own meeting.” To address sceptics who identify sloth in the industry, he emphasizes the care he takes in drafting emails using tools such as Copilot:
“I’m very thoughtful. If an email needs a high degree of EQ [emotional intelligence], and if I’m writing to a senior client, I would usually do it myself.”
The emphasis on “usually” is most reassuring—something clients hoodwinked by such firms would do well to heed.
### Agentic AI and the Cash Bonanza in Consulting
Across the consultancy field, agentic AI (software agents that complete menial tasks) is increasingly in use. In 2024, Boston Consulting Group earned a fifth of its revenue from AI-related work. IBM raked in over US$1 billion in sales commitments for consulting projects via its Watsonx system. After zero revenue from such tools in 2023, KPMG International received approximately US$650 million in business driven by generative AI.
The other big winners are companies that create generative AI itself. In May last year, PwC purchased over 100,000 licenses of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise system—making it OpenAI’s largest customer.
Seeking consultancy-guided platform services is, in effect, an exercise in cerebral corrosion. Deloitte offers its Zora AI platform, powered by NVIDIA AI, boasting:
“Simplify enterprise operations, boost productivity and efficiency, and drive more confident decision making that unlocks business value, with the help of an ever-growing portfolio of specialized AI agents.”
This marketing babbles on about how these agents “augment your human workforce with extensive domain-specific intelligence, flexible technical architecture, and built-in transparency to autonomously execute and analyze complex business processes.”
Given such claims, the middle ground of snake-oil consultancy looks increasingly irrelevant—not that it should ever have been relevant to begin with. Why bother with Deloitte’s hack pretenses when the raw technology is available straight from NVIDIA?
### The Future of Consultancy: Here to Stay or Doomed?
Despite the criticism, a September article in the *Harvard Business Review* insists consultancy is here to stay, albeit “being fundamentally reshaped.” However, the tone suggests the reshaping is hardly for the better.
In conclusion, as consultancy firms ride the wave of generative AI, clients should be wary. What may appear as enhanced efficiency and expertise could, in fact, be little more than another confidence trick—one that continues to profit consultants at the expense of genuine value and accountability.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/11/consultants-and-artificial-intelligence-the-next-great-confidence-trick/
