Just like vendors need to stand up and provide a real vision (and not AI hype), consultants need to sit down (with executives) and provide the execution clarity that will get buyers on the fast-track to procurement, organizational, industrial, and economic success. More specifically, at this time, they need to:

• Focus on a Niche (as you can’t be experts in everything)
• Establish Thought Leadership (not regurgitated AI hallucinations)
• Create Brand Awareness (for you and for the client)
• Outline an Organizational Path for Long Term Success (not just short term billing)

Focus on a Niche

In the market to come, failure is not an option and no one will want an old-school consultant who says “yes” first and figures it out later. Identify what you’re good at, how you can deliver significant value, and, more importantly, how you can identify significant value now. In the market that’s coming, sound long-term planning tends to fall by the wayside, so even though it’s the most important thing a company can do, chances are, they’re only going to spend on short-term initiatives until you prove that you can deliver the goods.

Establish Thought Leadership

There are hundreds of other consulting providers out there. If you don’t believe me, just ask your favourite AI Engine to give you 100. Why should they use you? How do they know that you know your stuff? How do they know that you’re on a path of continual improvement? How do they know that you’re focussed on being the best? If you don’t establish thought leadership, they don’t … which means that your only chance of success is if the other firms the customer is considering also don’t have any thought leadership and you want to compete on price, not on value.

Create Brand Awareness

Contrary to popular belief, you have to market, market, market. You need permanent brand visibility so that when people have a problem in your niche, they call you. This doesn’t mean expensive print ads in magazines no one looks at (despite impressive sounding circulation numbers), this doesn’t mean sponsoring expensive analyst reports year after year (especially considering that the vast majority of the A-level analysts are now long gone from the big firms), and it doesn’t mean hiring a VP of Marketing who’ll come in, use up a lot of your budget, and recommend the same-old same-old that didn’t work at the last company he was at. What it does mean is that you need to tap into the channels where your customer base already is. Speaking engagements at key low-key events (not overpriced, nosiy, trade shows with too many vendors and too little content), sponsored educational webinars for appropriate professional societies, and, most importantly, the independent educator sites (blogs, podcasts, video content) where educated, innovative, progressive buyers go for information and illumination on a daily basis.

Outline an Organizational Path for Long-Term Success

Although you need a quick-hit ROI niche to get that initial engagement, you don’t want to be seen as a one-trick pony. It’s important to have a plan that will allow you to guide your customers down a recovery path that will take them to their long term success.

The AI Crash is coming. The only thing we don’t know is how bad it’s going to be. Regardless, this time will be no different from Black Monday, the Dot Com Bust, or the 2008 Financial Crisis in that regardless of how bad it is, business must go on (or modern society won’t). That means we will need organizations to lead, and for that to happen, they need to start taking the lead now.

The solution today is essentially no different than the solution we we gave vendors for getting out of the 2008 Financial crisis:

• continued new product development
• continued spending on marketing and thought leadership (NOT AI HYPE)
• continued workforce development
• continued process improvement

Except the key now is to focus on real value and real capability, not BS AI just to cash in on the hype before the crash (and definitely not hallucinatory LLMs where they should never, ever, ever be used).

New Product Development

New product development that focusses on providing customers a better solution to their problems or a better fit for their desires at a great price point demonstrates:

• you’re a well-run company and a little market hiccup (even if it is a deafening belch) is not going to hold you back
• you realize new competitors are still entering the market every day with innovations of their own and the only way to provide lasting value is to continue to improve your solutions
• you know the only way to make things better is to keep going, and
• you take a level-headed approach to business with a plan to be around for the long haul

Marketing & Thought Leadership

Having the best product in the world is a moot point if no one knows it exists! This doesn’t mean you go crazy and overspend like you tend to do in a peak business year, just that you take the percentage of your budget you’d normally spend and spend it … wisely. Focussing on channels most likely to hit your target market still able, or willing, to spend, and you focus on core value and when you want to differentiate your offering, especially in high-tech or services, you focus on thought-leadership, not hype!

Marketing lets your potential customers know that you’re here for the long haul and still developing solutions that will help them lower costs, increase productivity, and maybe get out of this mess quicker. It’s also the only way to establish you as a market leader, which is key to not only being remembered when a customer has the budget, but getting the visit, request, and/or sale.

The reality is that, if you don’t market, you’re out of sight. If you’re out of sight, you’re out of mind. If you’re out of mind, you’re NOT being sought out when the customer has money.

Workforce Development

Your success all comes down to your people. Companies don’t build products … people build products. Companies don’t design winning marketing campaigns … people design winning marketing campaigns. Companies don’t think … people are the thought leaders. And if your budget is tight, you shouldn’t be adding too many bodies … when you need to add effective brainpower. And you do that by developing the staff you already have. (Which does NOT include giving them hallucinatory LLM access.)

If we’re truly moving in a knowledge and innovation economy, then you’re going to get a lot more out of educated, experienced, well-trained staff than just a body in a chair or cognitive atrophied idiots prompting hallucinatory Gen-AI LLMs that tell them to add rocks and strawberries-with-two-r’s to the mix.

The best developers can be 20 times as productive as an average developer (and can now produce a high quality, highly secure, new app at a lower cost than AI with current computing costs). The best inventors can produce 10 times as many inventions. The best thought leaders can produce market-changing ideas where an average person just produces refinements that might not even get noticed at all. Relatively speaking, if you’ve paid just a bit more to hire top talent, a few dollars on training can lead to a few thousand in productivity gains.

Process Improvement

Bring in an expert to do a complete review of your development, delivery, and operational processes to find opportunities for improvement that you won’t notice when buried in day-to-day operations.

This lowers your costs, which allows you to lower your prices, which allows you to grab more market share. You don’t necessarily have to hire a McKinsey Partner at 15K a day either … there are plenty of niche consultants who can jump in, do a focussed assessment, and net you great results for 5K a day in a couple of weeks … paying for themselves almost immediately.

I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to state the obvious, but every day we’re getting closer to doom and gloom as a result of continued over-valuation of AI companies that are losing billions of dollars a year with no plan for profitability by the end of the decade. Once they go public, a stock market crash is inevitable, and the only question is how bad will the AI crash be?. (If the trend line across the last 3 — Black Monday, Dot Com Bust, 2008 Financial Crisis — continues, the crash will be catastrophic and might trigger a simultaneous global default that ends modern civilization; but if we managed to learn anything from the past, it will just be Black Monday 2.0, which we’ll recover from in a couple of years.)

However, for the time being, the AI hype-induced economic inflation as a result of ridiculous explanations pulled out of a depth so dark that even a proctologist with a flashlight would have trouble finding the source, is getting worse by the day. It’s to the point where the only way that the current reality can be summed up is that we are living in a world of hallucinations (which is, of course, what Gen-AI is famous for).

So, when the crash happens and the fallout brings the next recession, depression, or global catastrophe, how are you going to get through it? And, more importantly, how can you prepare for it in a manner that will allow you to get through it? The answer now is almost the same as it was 20 years ago when we first discussed The Market Dilemma.

FAITH

But not faith in God, a God, Gods, what you perceive thy God or Gods to be, deities, supernatural beings, faith healers, shamans, or any other religious entity you might care to believe in. And definitely not faith in AI. (Although many of the tech bros are treating it like a God and, in the case of Christian religions, actively violating the second commandment.)

Faith in Humanity.

Twenty years ago, the answer was faith in human created systems designed to prevent, deal with, and correct problems that only work (and catch on) if people believe in them and have faith that things will get better with time. However, now that most systems are being redesigned to put AI at the core (where reliability is coin-flip), systems are not the answer — people are. People who employ good, old fashioned, Human Intelligence (HI!) while it still exists. (After all, if the majority of people in developed economies become dependent on Gen-AI, the cognitive atrophy will degrade our ability to the point that solving even simple problems will be nigh impossible.)

Systems, religion, and societies as a whole all fall apart when people lose faith. Just like the influence of a religion will decline until it eventually disappears if people stop believing in it and cease to make it part of their daily life, the strength of the system will degrade when people stop buying, selling, and participating in the system on a daily basis, and the strength of society as a whole will degrade when people stop believing in each other. Since we know a market crash is coming as a result of too much faith in the AI Hype which has led to overzealous buying, selling, evaluations, and run-ups that are unsustainable and can only lead to a crash, we need to return to our societal roots if we want to get through what is coming.

Not only do we need to return to business-as-usual pre-AI Mania, but we need to double down on Human Intelligence, Human Ingenuity, and Human Empathy. We have built, and rebuilt, societies from before recorded history without advanced tech (and definitely without BS AI — which is the Fastest Freeway to Financial Failure), and if this society is to continue, we must continue to build the foundations without unreliable probabilistic AI that has done more harm than good and use our intelligence to design the right systems and tech to allow for continued progress.

Progress that, as LEO XIV wrote in his Magnifica Humanitas, will require an updated human-centric social doctrine that safeguards humanity that focuses on truth, work, freedom, dignity, and shared responsibility. Respect for, and faith in, each other as we strive for peaceful progress and real justice. (Even though it was written by the Pope, it’s not a religious doctrine. It’s a human doctrine. The first real, significant, human doctrine since Pope Leo XIII published his Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891.)

This progress will come from those who don’t have, or promote, unrealistic expectations in what they can deliver, in the capability or value of the products and services their organizations offer, or their ability to deliver faster than is reasonable. Slow and steady still wins the race, and those who forget the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them (and run in circles). So take it day-by-day, make the best, human-led, decisions you can based on all the information available, and progress in a steadily forward fashion.