Consulting Is About People, Not Computers
When it comes to artificial intelligence and AI consulting startups, there aren’t many in the field for a simple reason: consulting is a human error sort of field. Consulting is a human thing and it always existed ever since the beginning of time. You ask for advice and you get it accordingly. And AI could never do that because in some cases it doesn’t really make sense to the artificial intelligence program or platform. And that’s why if you ask about consultation in terms of a market or legal or medical, you always find AI platforms like ChatGPT and all those other platforms.
They would just say that they can do that or we recommend you go to a consultant. Nonetheless, there are some AI consulting startups that are trying to provide you with consultation. But the truth is they’re not that strong. Now let’s dig into it by showcasing this AI consulting world.
AI Is Good at Doing Stuff, Not Thinking
The first thing you have to consider is that consulting as a main act is about the people. There are no two consultants that will provide you with the exact same advice to the point. Unless you’re asking about medical advice or something that you might find two people agreeing on. If you’re talking about random advice, go ask someone in the street about what they think their advice for you is to do today as a change or something to have fun in. Some people will tell you go for a run and others will tell you go have a pizza. So in terms of consultation as an act, it’s really subjective. It’s about giving advice and accordingly, it goes a long way depending on who the person giving advice is. And that’s why some people are good consultants and others are not so good in this sense.
Consulting Is Tricky: AI Can’t Handle It
So let’s now shift to artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence was designed so that it would help us with the boring tasks. So if I am writing an article every day or writing a certain job every day with no creativity, AI is perfect for the situation. That’s why it’s mostly suitable for automation. You would find this word all over AI, automated something, because automation is really a synonym of AI at this stage. But when it comes to creativity or thought, AI is not really good in this sense.
They do have a few things that you might think are creative, but they’re not. So, for example, we’re talking about MidJourney and AI image-generating software. If you ask it for an image of some green horse that is running, it will provide you with such. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s creative. It understands what a horse is and it could draw you a green horse. That doesn’t really mean it’s creative.
What’s creative is how a horse could look like. What is a horse? If you ask MidJourney to create an image that is just creative, it won’t. It will just create an image based on what it learned, which is the case with many artists in the common art world. There are some pure artists who would just innovate in things that we never thought of. And that’s the pure difference between AI and humans at that stage.
ChatGPT Can’t Give Advice: Here’s Why
The act of consultancy or consulting is not easy for AI because it involves a lot of responsibility while humans don’t have this sense. The truth is a huge percentage of consultants are doing mistakes on a daily basis. Business consultants, finance consultants, medical consultants are always doing mistakes. And that’s part of it being human. AI doing mistakes is something that the world does not want. It’s something similar to the moral dilemma.
And that’s the problem of why full self-driving with Teslas and with other cars is not really adopting the world. Because we have a problem if machines screw up while doing the full self-driving, even though statistically it’s better if all cars are just operated by robots. But if a car hits a pregnant lady in the street, then we would feel this emotional objection that we have that will create this moral dilemma. And that’s why AI can’t really just choose based on its opinion. It doesn’t have that. It just has a certain amount of instructions that it works on. So consulting is an error trait or it has a high percentage of error. And that’s why it’s a field that AI cannot really get into as easily as you would think.
Consulting Companies Aren’t Scared of AI: Here’s Why
Additionally, consulting is all about being modern. It’s all about updating things to do that are out of the box. This out-of-the-box definition doesn’t exist with AI. AI is literally learning from the box. Try tools like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini when it comes to giving advice and you’ll see that they can’t be responsible. They’re always going to try to tell you, “I’m not sure of the accuracy of information” or you’re going to see a disclaimer at the bottom of the page saying that ChatGPT is not accurate sometimes or that “don’t take this information as serious consulting information” so that we wouldn’t get legally binding problems with it.
So platforms like OpenAI or companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and all these companies creating those platforms are worried about this sense and they can never remove this disclaimer because it’s a big responsibility. And it’s still a moral dilemma for AI to do consultancy or to give a consultancy or an advice and for people to actually follow it because if something goes bad, it all goes back to the AI company.
AI Can Help Consultants, But It Won’t Replace Them
When you heard about the AI boom and how companies like ChatGPT are getting hundreds of millions of users and how Gemini is growing, how Claude is getting a lot of investments and so on, you would see how companies feared that they would get replaced like Google with their code red about search engines and so on. But there are companies that didn’t flinch and those companies are consultancy companies. Companies like Deloitte, McKinsey, PWC, and so on.
They adopt using AI, that’s true, but in their core businesses, which is consultancy, that is not going to change because consultants are people who learn at all stages or every day information about markets, AI, blockchain, and so on. So their opinions are important in this matter. They’re just like advisors and advice is always recommended as it’s a second opinion. Elements like research, on the other hand, could be replaced by AI and the first companies that are going to do that are actually consultancy companies because it’s a repetitive process that they would definitely want to replace with artificial intelligence.
People Still Need People: Why Clients Need Consultants
Finally, when it comes to consultancy, people need the human element. It is so much different seeing. If you ask ChatGPT about what is your advice to building a restaurant or you have a problem with your restaurant and you’re asking ChatGPT to help you with this, it will give you a few things and you will consider that’s interesting and then you would consider to use it or to do it. But if you talk to a restaurant owner and that person gives you advice, you would value this advice much more because it came from another human who had eye contact with you in a way that AI and robots cannot really perform at that stage. We need the human contact and the assurance that it gets on a subliminal level.
AI Consulting Startups: Finding Their Place
That’s the case of AI consulting startups and how it’s one of those moral dilemmas that is not going to change in the near future.
PS. We believe that the sweet spot lies in the integration of AI with the human experience, read more about our philosophy here.
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