Uber Cofounder Kalanick Says AI Means Some Consultants Are in 'Big Trouble' (businessinsider.com) 27
Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick thinks AI is about to shake up consulting -- and for "traditional" professionals, not in a good way. From a report: 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."
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."
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."
With Bated Breath (Score:2)
Here's hoping that AI will eliminate a good chunk of the compliance and accounting consultant industry.
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First, you have to eliminate all the compliance and accounting bullshit reports.
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- 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
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Here's hoping that AI will eliminate a good chunk of the compliance and accounting consultant industry.
Unless your job requires physical maintenance and presence, all jobs will be at risk from AI in the future. Star Trek-style AI doctors may even be coming, the only difference being that it won't be a hologram, but a screen giving instructions to a medic or orderly on physical care. Same for law. Same for, as you pointed out, accounting, management, coding, sysadmin, you name it. If you're a man wanting a paycheck, and you aren't one of the few that make AI software, then the future is physical. Grab that pi
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Yeah, anytime now.
Consultants (Score:3)
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.
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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
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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.
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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."
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That's how you know this commentary wasn't generated by AI
That ship sailed a while ago (Score:2)
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)
AI should be good at this (Score:2)
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.
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For "checklist" type stuff, that vetting can be cone by an expert system or the like.
There are two types of tech consultants (and tech auditors): Those that actually know how what they are doing and that know how things work. These are generally engineers that somehow by accident moved into these posisions. (That is how it happened to me and it always was only part-time.) And those that follow checklists and formal approaches and often essentially just verify presence of the right words in reports. These ge
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.
Best Paid Jobs (Score:2)
Like all technology, AI will be used first to replace the best paid jobs, or at least those with the largest payroll. The "killer app" for personal computers was the spreadsheet. It made very high paid people much more productive and meant you needed fewer of them to get the same result. AI by its nature is going to hit high value knowledge workers of all kinds. If you are getting paid for what you know, you are likely in trouble.
On the other hand if you are paid for what you do, the problem is not just kno
Does he know what consultants are? (Score:2)
Consultants do all kinds of jobs, just like employees. They're just paid by the hour instead of by the month, and taxed via 1099 instead of 1040. They tend to work for a specific company for shorter durations. Otherwise, the work they do, isn't materially different from the work employees do.
Consultants might code, they might manage, they might run projects, they might give advice. It's really the same difference between taxi driver and Uber driver.
So AI might be a threat to consultants, but not specificall
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Is that different in yours?
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https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
one who gives professional advice or services : expert
"Consultant" can refer to a very broad range of services. It's hard to distinguish between "contractor" and "consultant." In my career, I've seen the terms used interchangeably.
Good Riddance. (Score:2)
If your job can be done by a fancy chatbot, you probably need to be doing something else with your time.