6ai — bringing thinking back applied intelligence. Think. Don’t Outsource There was an article the other day in The Telegraph titled “Accenture’s crash shows the consultancy racket is finished.” Although I agree with the article, this journalist’s revelation is a bit late. Anyone paying attention already knows this, and the “crash” has many maturation stages before the racket is gone for good. The consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies, according to the author of The Big Con, Mariana Mazzucato. Big consulting serves neither citizens nor consumers, and it stunts innovation and obfuscates corporate and political accountability, she goes on to say. The consulting industry has pulled off a confidence trick, which, over the many decades, has hollowed out our thinking. The subtitle says: “Smart chatbots have exposed just how shallow much of the industry has become.” Again, I agree with the premise, but “chatbots” in themselves, as the argument for AI replacing much of consulting work goes, are just more hype to sell more AI stuff. There is always change when new automation technology enters the scene, and the consulting industry is facing the same fate as many other industries have before. But it is fair that this is a very powerful automation technology. The new hype is that companies like OpenAI/ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are taking over from consulting. I don’t think so. These models don’t solve problems, make organizations think and get better. They just speed up information processing and generate outputs that are already programmed in the training data. These models tell us nothing new. Claude AI can provide research in seconds that a junior analyst might take hours or days to produce and package coherently in a slide deck. Then the senior partner comes along and charges $1500 per hour