164 - The Consulting Industry

Over the years our team, now working on Norn.ai, has focused on building systems that can deliver value to some of the domains that currently perform worst among the world's high-impact markets. Any domain with abundant and interconnected hyper-complex problems will struggle in practice, but some struggle more than others.

The Consulting industry has gained steadily increasing infamy over the past few years for dramatically overcharging governments and corporations, gross and flagrant conflicts of interest, and cultivating a captive and wholly dependent client base that chronically avoids building any in-house value. Much like the sustainability metrics I shared previously, the divide between the status quo of this industry and what our technology could deliver to it quickly surges into the high 90s for percentage savings on time and funds, while adding potent new benefits that consultancies today don't and in some cases can't offer.

It is already well-known that the consulting industry is "hallucinating" to a growing degree, as they increasingly utilize trashbot technology like LLMs to deliver quantifiably worse and less diverse advice. By BCG's own numbers, consultants utilizing trashbots performed 23% worse on solving business problems, and had 41% less diversity of thought in their article "How People Can Create---and Destroy---Value with Generative AI".

What this means in practice is that lazy consultants with access to trashbots are further degrading the value that their firms offer to clients globally, down from when I originally drafted this document in late 2022. These major firms could choose to invest in viable technology, and indeed my co-founded and I have given 3 of them that option personally, as far back as 2020 in one case. Thus far, they've all chosen the most idiotic and least ethical path, with the continuation of that path leading them off a tall cliff in due course.

Even though the earliest and currently quantifiable metrics offer an already insurmountable advantage, Norn technology is designed for recursive self-improvement and human-like learning at scales and speeds not possible for humans, along with the benefits of collective intelligence. That means that the advantages only grow from there, with the bottleneck of utilizing those growing advantages falling on how quickly humans and organizations can adapt far more often than they do on hardware availability.

It remains to be seen if any of the major consultancies will choose to survive the coming years, but the significant added value to clients can be delivered with or without them. This can help governments and corporations start working through that substantial backlog of unresolved hyper-complex problems, streamlining their processes and delivering far greater value to their own clients and citizens in turn.