Uber Cofounder Kalanick Says AI Means Some Consultants Are in 'Big Trouble' (businessinsider.com)
- Reference: 0177030495
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/04/15/1918257/uber-cofounder-kalanick-says-ai-means-some-consultants-are-in-big-trouble
- Source link: https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-ai-consultants-deloitte-ey-kpmg-cloudkitchens-2025-4
> The former Uber CEO said consultants who mostly follow instructions or do repetitive tasks are at risk of being replaced by AI. "If you're a traditional consultant and you're just doing the thing, you're executing the thing, you're probably in some big trouble," he said. He joked about what that future of consultancy might look like: "Push a button. Get a consultant."
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> However, Kalanick said the professionals who would come out ahead would be the ones who build tools rather than just use them. "If you are the consultant that puts the things together that replaces the consultant, maybe you got some stuff," he said. "You're going to profitable companies with competitive moats, making that moat bigger," he explained. "Making their profit bigger is probably pretty interesting from a financial point of view."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/travis-kalanick-ai-consultants-deloitte-ey-kpmg-cloudkitchens-2025-4
Consultants (Score:2)
Consultants are people you pay to give you an outside opinion that magically matches yours, so you can give a report to upper management and have them sign off on what you want to do and have an external entity to blame if it goes wrong.
Usually, anyway. They're otherwise pointless people providing social lubricant in business because humans have trouble cooperating effectively for long periods of time.
I've never met a consultant who couldn't have been replaced with a decent sales rep or an expert employee,
Re: (Score:2)
Cope. This entire post is cope.
You bring in consultants to provide expertise you don't normally have to keep around. You don't necessarily need a system architect all the damn time so you don't keep on on the payroll because they are expensive and you don't want to have to pay system architect wages for a system architect that's going to be mostly doing code monkey stuff because you don't have enough architecture work for them
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you'll see it as a game of semantics, but I don't.... those are contractors, not consultants.
Consultants are paid to come in to tell you what you should do, contractors are hired to actually do it for you.
Re: (Score:2)
> Consultants are people you pay to give you an outside opinion that magically matches yours, so you can give a report to upper management and have them sign off on what you want to do and have an external entity to blame if it goes wrong.
> Usually, anyway. They're otherwise pointless people providing social lubricant in business because humans have trouble cooperating effectively for long periods of time.
> I've never met a consultant who couldn't have been replaced with a decent sales rep or an expert employee, and saved the company a lot of consulting fees by doing so.
An older coworker of mine was known for saying, "We consider consultants experts because they aren't from this company." Sometimes, that's what upper management needs to get on board with what the peons under them are saying. It sucks, but apparently throwing money at people with nodding heads is better than just listening to the people doing the work.
Visionary (Score:2)
> "Making their profit bigger is probably pretty interesting from a financial point of view."
In the world of fabulously insightful quotes, this ranks right up there with coaches sagely explaining their victories because their teams "came to play football."
Re: (Score:2)
That's how you know this commentary wasn't generated by AI
That ship sailed a while ago (Score:2)
I suspect that the consultant industry had already been mostly decimated by the google search engine. The days when a consultant could just read a piece of technical info at point A, and regurgitate it at point B for a fat hourly rate? That horse left the barn 15 or 20 years ago. Any consultants still around are providing something that a dozen google searches can't duplicate.
Chatgpt will eat into the industry further, but probably not as much as people think.
It'll be different when we get to Isaac A
Re: That ship sailed a while ago (Score:2)
Except a lot of documents for a lot of commercial products are not publicly available for Google to index.
AI should be good at this (Score:2)
In my experience, most consultants collect all your data and then tell you what you want to hear. Even a poor AI should be able to do that. I believe the famous quote is that a consultant is someone "who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is". There only real function that I have been able to discover is to give management an excuse when things go wrong "we did what the consultants recommended".
Vetting not obsolete yet (Score:1)
Humans still have to vet most of what comes out of AI, as AI often produces stupid or dangerous answers, and often can't explain why it says what it says.
Government consultants are safe (Score:2)
Until AI learns to give kickbacks and funnel money through politicians' friends and relatives.
Yep, I have seen "those" consultants (Score:2)
Also as IT auditors from the "big 4". All checklist, no understanding. Worthless. And well within reach of what a combination of an expert system and a specially trained LLM can do.
With Bated Breath (Score:2)
Here's hoping that AI will eliminate a good chunk of the compliance and accounting consultant industry.
Re: (Score:2)
First, you have to eliminate all the compliance and accounting bullshit reports.
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Consultancy seems to be divided into three types:
- A taskmaster for businesses that are so mired in their own self-destructive habits, they need a new 'boss' to make basic decisions. These are the worst because, it's 'by the numbers' work performed with the cheapest (and least accurate) tools at massive mark-up.
- Experts working as a gig-economy employee, who use their old technology to build a department/product to compete with external departments/products.
- A playpen for pretending to create a dep