A recent post on LinkedIn noted how there’s a wave of AI products flooding the consultancy and advisory space and how they are, frankly mediocre, overpriced wrappers on public models with minimum innovation, if any.

This is sad, but true, and it’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that some of the Big X firms are training tens of thousands of consultants and f6ckw@ds on these tools to generate hundred page pitch decks and three hundred page strategy and implementation guides of standard generic, meaningless, drivel to deliver to you as “highly tailored guidance and expertise from their leading partners with 20 years experience delivering high-value projects” and charge you tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege.

This is especially egregious when you can use free/cheap (and I’m talking put it on your personal credit card cheap because you won’t notice the fee that is less than your monthly coffee charge from the coffee shop) to build the exact same pitches, strategy, and implementation guides from the thousands of freely available documents on the web in a few hours with a few generic prompts over a Sunday morning coffee. (And then, when the coffee kicks in, realize it’s all a load of cr@p and put in the bit bucket, but at least you will know what a load of cr@p looks like in pitch deck, strategy guide, and implementation plan form and will recognize it the next time an overpriced Big X tries to sell it to you for a ridiculous price tag and will have learned something from the exercise.)

Now that there are companies selling overpriced “custom” products to these consultancies, the situation is only getting worse, especially when the “customization” is just a wrapper with some pre-engineered prompts that aren’t well tested, only work at a point in time, don’t really give the consultancies what they need, and sometimes translate mediocre inputs to inputs that are even worse. Moreover, when you consider the price is sometimes a 100X multiple on the products they build on top of, it’s disgusting. Consultancies are paying more for less, and, in return, you are paying even more for even less!

Which makes no sense when the current publicly available LLM tech is being offered cheap (to try and hook you on it, even though, as we’ve repeatedly explained, the tech is not ready for prime time and will never deliver more than a fraction of what they are promising), and new implementations will get a lot cheaper. Just look at how DeepSeek undercuts the cost by a factor of 100 and gets 90% of ChatGPT (as long as you don’t mind exposing all of your secrets to the CCP). LLMs are nothing more than a fancy next-gen “deep learning” Neural Networks that construct responses vs. serving up canned responses (which is why hallucinations and lies are a core function, not an error that can be trained out) which gets us closer (but no cigar) to decent natural language processing (NLP) for the express purpose of the generation of desired outputs from inputs, but not there (and now, in addition to all the false positives and false negatives, we had to deal with, we now get to deal with hallucinations and lies as well). It’s not secret magic, it’s layers and layers of interconnected statistics and probabilities that no human can understand, in rather standard models that any Theoretical CS and Applied Math PhDs can build, and implementations that are better and cheaper are going to keep appearing as time goes on.

This means three things to any consultancy thinking about using these custom “AI” solutions

• you still have to be even more tech savvy to use them to any degree of effectiveness
• it’s not “the art of the prompt“, it’s the art of the training (even though they don’t really learn because they are NOT intelligent) because that determines the maximum level of effectiveness you will ever reach with them (and you need to provide them with sufficient correct data, which needs to be in the high gigabytes at a minimum, and, preferably, in the petabytes)
• you don’t have to worry about when they are right (enough), which will happen between 90% and 95% of the time with proper training and proper prompting, or when they are obviously wrong, which will happen a very low percentage of the time (say 5% to 9%), but when they are oh so wrong but the response is constructed in a way that is oh so convincing that an above average person in intellect and experience wouldn’t know otherwise (that danger zone between obviously wrong and good enough that is likely only 1% to 2% of the time).

Now remember that your consultants aren’t that tech savvy, and you should know right off the bat incorporating and using these is going to be difficult and time consuming. (There’s a reason we are constantly advising you to be very careful about using Big X for tech selection and tech projects, and that’s because, even though they say it is, it’s NOT their forte. They weren’t built on tech, and they don’t have the best talent in tech — that talent goes to the big tech companies who can offer the 500K salaries to leading devs or the wild-west startups that leading devs think are cool.)

You only have so much clean and complete data you can use for training. You can’t just throw in the 1000s of decks you’ve built as you can’t share work you’ve explicitly created and sold to past clients, and the AI won’t anonymize the decks and suggestions (even though you think it will). It won’t know that “Ford” is the name of your client and might think that “Ford Data” is another term for shallow data and copy sections from that custom strategy straight into your pitch deck for General Motors (and chances are your overworked junior consultant won’t catch it when skimming that 200 page deck with only 2 hours to go before the meeting). And we know what happens then … (and it ends with the consultancy not keeping either client).

It will take a lot of analysis to identify those 1% to 2% of cases where it is very, very wrong but so convincingly right that you will miss some. What happens when you do and give your client advice that explodes in their faces? (We’ll let you answer that one.)

And for you as a consumer, if your consultancy is using this Bogus AI tech, it means that:

• the situation that results from solution delivered might be even worse than the situation you started with (as should be evidenced not just by the tech project failure rate that is approaching 92% but the fact that 42% of projects are being abandoned during implementation!)

A solution designed by Gen-AI is not a solution. A real solution is a solution designed by human intelligence that uses real, augmented intelligence, to research and validate that solution. Remember that if you are going to hire a consultant!