I've seen a couple of news stories recently that tell me how completely screwed that major consulting firms are. The first was Accenture laying off 1% of their workforce to demonstrate that they're all in on GenAI. Really? Accenture wants to advertise that they can be replaced by an $20/month LLM?
Accenture plans on 'exiting' s...
Accenture plans on 'exiting' staff who can't be reskilled on AI amid restructuring strategy
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said as advanced AI becomes core to the company's strategy, employees are expected to "retrain and retool" at scale.
The second news story was Deloitte charging the Australian government $290k for a report that was generated by an LLM, full of nonsense. These consulting firms aren't just *talking* about using AI in lieu of having smart people research and think hard—they're actually doing it.
Deloitte to partially refund A...
Deloitte Australia to partially refund $290,000 report filled with suspected AI-generated errors
Deloitte Australia will partially refund the Australian government for a report filled with apparent AI-generated errors. The report published in July includes a fabricated court judgment quote and references to nonexistent research. Researcher Chris Rudge alerted the media about the errors. Deloitte reviewed the report and confirmed some inaccuracies. The company agreed to repay the final contract installment, with the amount to be disclosed later. The revised report published Friday disclosed the use of Azure OpenAI in its creation. Quotes and references to nonexistent reports were removed but the report's recommendations remained unchanged.
Now, I'm just a simple unfrozen caveman, but it seems to me that the competitive advantage of Deloitte et al used to be "we hire experienced, talent, brilliant people, if you pay us, you can have access to them." What I'm hearing here is, instead, "we have a subscription to ChatGPT." 🤔
If I ran a consulting firm, I'd be yelling as loudly as I could that we will never use LLMs in lieu of the work of our experienced, talented, brilliant people. If a consulting firm's work is so shitty that it can be replaced with an LLM, then they should go out of business as soon as possible.
The big consulting firms are bragging about their use of AI because they're always chasing trends (blockchain, IoT, etc.) and selling them to governments and corporations. But they don't seem to get that AI is the one that threatens to undermine their existence.
To the extent to which big consulting firms don't feel threatened by AI, it's because they understand that a big part of their job is merely decision-laundering. A big organization wants to do a thing, and they need somebody to blame in case that thing goes wrong? Time to bring on a big consultant!
Waldo Jaquith