Can someone explain to me how and why consulting works? If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right, he would be considered a loser. Now make it a company, and corporations and governments queue up for their advice. Wouldn't your own employees be in a better position to give you advice than people who know nothing of your business and who's only skills are googling and making presentations?
Before they used AI, they used just-out-of-grad-school interns...
People who've never work in consulting have no idea how crazy the gap is between the price of reports like these and the salary that's paid to the people actually writing them.
AI is a trap too sweet to ignore. Its ruining young folks future by removing the hard effort part of learning, which then builds more resistant character which is more able to wade through daily crap of our adult lives. Some sort of patience with life, its not a skill that comes on its own.
And clearly its (almost) everywhere, including companies who should do and know better. AI will make humanity more lazy seems to be the conclusion.
Well fear not, those few who will not be lured by it will stand tall and far apart, and can achieve a lot more professionally and personally in crowds utterly reliant on their tiny little llm helpers. We all choose daily how our lives will look like from now on.
The number of people managing people managing people who actually do the work is quite high in some of these firms. The partners are rolling in cash, while the actual consultants are hoping to climb the ladder. In some geographies, this has created cliques that keep each other in positions and they make money together while strangling any up and coming competition from below.
In theory, an official with skin in the game can use a consultant to learn how to avoid mistakes. We don’t have AI smart-enough to speak about new kinds of mistakes (yet). So it seems to me that the public official should be using AI more than the consultant, for now:
- Find prior consulting products (reports) relevant to my situation. Maybe Deloitte produced a great piece of public advice back in 2007 and AI can style-transfer it to my set of 2025 vocabulary and assumptions.
- What would an average citizen, with access to AI, expect me to do on their behalf and communicate back?
- I meet with a consultant and provide AI with a transcript. It should research a reading list for us.
Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution".
In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks.
Of course there are the cases that managers have personal motives, either to add an extra (useless) achievement on their list or even worse to get referral fee or presents from the external consultancy.
As someone who did an MBA and was groomed to be a Consultant and then repented (now a software engineer) you have to understand that the customer of a consultancy project is an exec.
1. The exec has been charged with exploring a new product space, a potential M&A deal, more vertical integration etc etc
2. The exec needs a gauge on the "size of the prize", is this thing worth doing? roughly how will it be done? how long etc.
3. The exec probably already has a rough idea or gut feeling about one such option
4. The consultants produce something that usually supports the gut feeling, other times it will suggest alternatives and provide some facts and figures to support
While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch.
During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.
I've worked for a Big 3 and can't say this happens that much.
What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”.
They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.
In the UK there is a bit of a problem with a revolving door between government and the big consultancy firms.
The most egregious example of this is where the big accountancy firms offer political parties help in formulating tax policy and once it's enacted then go around charging companies for their expertise on how to comply/avoid the new rules.
This is primarily a story of a failure to supervise the creation of the report, rather than anything related to AI.
The role of the outsourced consultancy in such a project is to make sure the findings withstand public scrutiny. They clearly failed on this. It's quite shocking that the only consequence is a partial refund rather than a review of any current and future engagements with the consultancy due to poor performance.
There shouldn't be a meaningful difference if the error in the report is minor or consequential for the finding, or if it is introduced by poorly used AI or a caffeinated up consultant in a late-night session.
CEOs keep taking (mostly misguided) about how GenAI will replace their people. The thing they miss, and this highlights, is that customers will also expect to pay far less for GenAI produced workloads, which likely more than eliminates any cost savings.
Congrats clueless CEO… you’re now selling a worse product at lower margins. Success!
I've been a consultant for most of the last 20 (actually come to think of it, 25) years. Even did a brief stint at Deloitte.
There is a lot of prejudice against consulting. Places like Deloitte, Accenture, are some of the largest companies in the world, so when they fuck up (which they seem previously designed to do, Deloitte was the quest job I've ever had), they fuck up big and very visibly.
But there is a super long tail of consultancies that are basically mom-and-pop businesses offering expertise that other small and medium sized businesses can't afford to keep on staff 100% of the time. It's not just management consulting, there is a lot of consulting for execution in a wide variety of areas. We do our jobs and go away quietly and someone else gets to take the credit. That's pretty much the nature of consulting.
So you never hear about it. You just get the sound bites about McKinsey or whoever charging millions to tell NYC "use garbage cans".
For a bit of background, this report concerned a problematic IT system that was incorrectly sending life-ruining fines to people for not meeting their requirements to apply for so many jobs, accept jobs, etc. whilst on government assistance. The fines came in the form of a judgment debt so people would literally have a debt bailiff show up and start carting their property away. Due to a seriously flawed IT system, this even happened to people who weren't on any government benefits at all.
So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.
Just today a consulting firm asked if they can use AI to generate user guides and documentation.
I refused because of the hallucination issues. But got overruled by the end users - who are going to use these documents. They are convinced that AI will move things faster. When it comes time to using the document they are most likely going to feed the doc to AI and ask for summary and steps.
Write document using AI and then read/summarize using AI.
I have worked in Consultancies for a long time. And many people here don't know what they do. Of course, there are bad apples that cheat. But a lot of good value in consultancies too! One evidence is that they are still around and earn billions.
I work in a building where Deloitte has an office. I see their employees riding the elevator and sometimes in other common areas. I just same here to say they are some of the most depressed and down-trodden group of people I have ever seen. They are noticeably different than other employees in the building.
What's wrong with working at Deloitte that is does this to people?
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 59.4 ms ] threadBefore they used AI, they used just-out-of-grad-school interns...
People who've never work in consulting have no idea how crazy the gap is between the price of reports like these and the salary that's paid to the people actually writing them.
Can we get a refund for all of the others too?
And clearly its (almost) everywhere, including companies who should do and know better. AI will make humanity more lazy seems to be the conclusion.
Well fear not, those few who will not be lured by it will stand tall and far apart, and can achieve a lot more professionally and personally in crowds utterly reliant on their tiny little llm helpers. We all choose daily how our lives will look like from now on.
Well, then ...
- Find prior consulting products (reports) relevant to my situation. Maybe Deloitte produced a great piece of public advice back in 2007 and AI can style-transfer it to my set of 2025 vocabulary and assumptions.
- What would an average citizen, with access to AI, expect me to do on their behalf and communicate back?
- I meet with a consultant and provide AI with a transcript. It should research a reading list for us.
In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks.
Of course there are the cases that managers have personal motives, either to add an extra (useless) achievement on their list or even worse to get referral fee or presents from the external consultancy.
1. The exec has been charged with exploring a new product space, a potential M&A deal, more vertical integration etc etc
2. The exec needs a gauge on the "size of the prize", is this thing worth doing? roughly how will it be done? how long etc.
3. The exec probably already has a rough idea or gut feeling about one such option
4. The consultants produce something that usually supports the gut feeling, other times it will suggest alternatives and provide some facts and figures to support
During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.
What does happen is that you were pitched/sold by a perfect PowerPoint presented by a senior partner/manager, but all the work afterwards is done by the 26-year old fresh-out-of-MBA consultants. The partner is still responsible for the project, but mostly on a “I'll review your work later from an expensive restaurant I'll bill the client for”.
They'll also invent the wildest things when it comes to tech work. I was working as an expert on software development and integrations, and often had to tell clients that what the consultants promised is simply not possible.
The most egregious example of this is where the big accountancy firms offer political parties help in formulating tax policy and once it's enacted then go around charging companies for their expertise on how to comply/avoid the new rules.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi...
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack...
The role of the outsourced consultancy in such a project is to make sure the findings withstand public scrutiny. They clearly failed on this. It's quite shocking that the only consequence is a partial refund rather than a review of any current and future engagements with the consultancy due to poor performance.
There shouldn't be a meaningful difference if the error in the report is minor or consequential for the finding, or if it is introduced by poorly used AI or a caffeinated up consultant in a late-night session.
Congrats clueless CEO… you’re now selling a worse product at lower margins. Success!
There is a lot of prejudice against consulting. Places like Deloitte, Accenture, are some of the largest companies in the world, so when they fuck up (which they seem previously designed to do, Deloitte was the quest job I've ever had), they fuck up big and very visibly.
But there is a super long tail of consultancies that are basically mom-and-pop businesses offering expertise that other small and medium sized businesses can't afford to keep on staff 100% of the time. It's not just management consulting, there is a lot of consulting for execution in a wide variety of areas. We do our jobs and go away quietly and someone else gets to take the credit. That's pretty much the nature of consulting.
So you never hear about it. You just get the sound bites about McKinsey or whoever charging millions to tell NYC "use garbage cans".
So, a report gets commissioned that a company like Deloitte gets paid $440k for, and then they cheat and use AI to generate it, complete with more errors. Imagine what would happen if they retained Deloitte next to build the system. I foresee another repeat of the Fujitsu Royal Mail scandal.
I refused because of the hallucination issues. But got overruled by the end users - who are going to use these documents. They are convinced that AI will move things faster. When it comes time to using the document they are most likely going to feed the doc to AI and ask for summary and steps.
Write document using AI and then read/summarize using AI.
What's wrong with working at Deloitte that is does this to people?