Sustainable Success in AI Consulting
Key Points
- The AI consulting market is exploding, with revenues projected to hit $630 billion by 2028 and over half of large enterprises already seeking AI services, attracting many newcomers to the field.
- Long‑term success as an AI consultant hinges on leveraging an existing consulting practice and client base—“winners keep winning”—because distribution and established relationships are the primary drivers of sustained business.
- A common pitfall is the “AI‑wash” approach, where firms rebrand their existing services with AI buzzwords without genuinely mastering the technology, leading to superficial proposals and weak execution.
- Lack of real AI expertise quickly betrays consultants, as even basic technical questions (e.g., when and how to use Retrieval‑Augmented Generation) expose their knowledge gaps and erode client trust.
Sections
- Untitled Section
- Beyond AI Washing: Concrete Consulting - The speaker criticizes vague AI buzzwords in consulting, urging firms to replace “AI‑powered” jargon with clear, domain‑specific solutions and intelligent delivery rather than competing solely on price.
- Specificity Over Generality in AI Consulting - The speaker explains that embedding AI into a specialized domain—exemplified by Cursor’s development‑environment focus—yields deeper engagement, pricing power, and market advantage, urging consultants to offer a few narrowly defined AI services rather than a broad, generic offering.
- Niche Positioning to Avoid AI Frauds - The speaker stresses that clear, specific content and a focused niche are essential for AI consultants to establish credibility and differentiate themselves from the flood of fraudsters and generic competitors.
- AI Enables Living Templates - The speaker critiques overstated AI hype, stresses authenticity, and explains how AI transforms consulting templates into dynamic, customizable service offerings.
- Seeking Traits of Ideal AI Consultants - The speaker urges listeners to share positive behavioral traits of effective AI consultants, emphasizing the critical need to get these traits right to prevent damaging the AI ecosystem.
Full Transcript
# Sustainable Success in AI Consulting **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ) **Duration:** 00:18:58 ## Summary - The AI consulting market is exploding, with revenues projected to hit $630 billion by 2028 and over half of large enterprises already seeking AI services, attracting many newcomers to the field. - Long‑term success as an AI consultant hinges on leveraging an existing consulting practice and client base—“winners keep winning”—because distribution and established relationships are the primary drivers of sustained business. - A common pitfall is the “AI‑wash” approach, where firms rebrand their existing services with AI buzzwords without genuinely mastering the technology, leading to superficial proposals and weak execution. - Lack of real AI expertise quickly betrays consultants, as even basic technical questions (e.g., when and how to use Retrieval‑Augmented Generation) expose their knowledge gaps and erode client trust. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=0s) **Untitled Section** - - [00:04:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=249s) **Beyond AI Washing: Concrete Consulting** - The speaker criticizes vague AI buzzwords in consulting, urging firms to replace “AI‑powered” jargon with clear, domain‑specific solutions and intelligent delivery rather than competing solely on price. - [00:07:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=457s) **Specificity Over Generality in AI Consulting** - The speaker explains that embedding AI into a specialized domain—exemplified by Cursor’s development‑environment focus—yields deeper engagement, pricing power, and market advantage, urging consultants to offer a few narrowly defined AI services rather than a broad, generic offering. - [00:11:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=664s) **Niche Positioning to Avoid AI Frauds** - The speaker stresses that clear, specific content and a focused niche are essential for AI consultants to establish credibility and differentiate themselves from the flood of fraudsters and generic competitors. - [00:14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=895s) **AI Enables Living Templates** - The speaker critiques overstated AI hype, stresses authenticity, and explains how AI transforms consulting templates into dynamic, customizable service offerings. - [00:18:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-xvYoIMHcQ&t=1114s) **Seeking Traits of Ideal AI Consultants** - The speaker urges listeners to share positive behavioral traits of effective AI consultants, emphasizing the critical need to get these traits right to prevent damaging the AI ecosystem. ## Full Transcript
We need to talk about what it takes to
be an actual A+ AI consultant because I
see a lot of people who are either
considering that as a career path or
actively pursuing it who aren't able to
deliver the kind of extraordinary value
that would let them retain clients over
the long term. In this video, I'm going
to talk about what I see as positive
behaviors that actually promote
long-term value for clients when you're
consulting on AI and also the opposite
things that I see people actually
practicing a lot that aren't supportive
of the value they're going to need to
sustain to have a long-term consulting
practice. But first, let's find out why
everyone's running to the field. It's
exploding. Revenues are projected to
reach $630 billion in AI consulting
alone by 2028. I don't know, that sounds
like madeup money. It's a lot of money.
Whether it's 500 billion or a trillion,
who knows? It's a big pile of money. So,
people are running at it. Over 50% of
large enterprises are already using AI
consulting services. And that doesn't
even count the smallmedium businesses
all over this country in the United
States and also the rest of the world
who are looking for support on AI, let
alone individuals, sole proprietorships,
indie hackers, etc. The vast majority of
consulting firms, and I'm not even
including AI in that. I'm not saying
you'd like segment it down to just AI
consulting firms. Consulting firms
overall are reporting a bump in demand
for AI expertise. Which gets us to our
first point, which is that winners keep
winning. In other words, the first rule
of being an AI consultant is to be
conveniently enough a consultant about
something else with an existing book of
business. Why? It goes back to one of
the foundational laws in the AI era.
Distribution is king. If you already
have dist distribution relationships
with other clients about other work,
right? Maybe you're a marketing
consulting agency. I don't know. Maybe
you actually consult with folks on their
development team or on team formation or
on process improvement. There's a
million in one things that consultants
already do. And the convenient thing
about a new general purpose technology
is that AI can help with all of it,
right? Like yay AI. And so what I find
in practice, and this gets at our first
pitfall, is that a lot of these
consultancies that already exist tend to
just AI wash what they're doing. They
just paint the big sign, make it AI now,
right? And then let's put some AI into
our proposals, then we'll be fine,
right? But the people delivering the
service don't actually have A+ knowledge
of AI. And so when they go and they talk
to the client and the client just asks a
perfectly reasonable question like when
and where should I use RG? I hear a lot
about RG. You can just sort of see the
business style consultant kind of blanch
visibly and they're like, I don't know,
probably should talk to a technical
person about that. That's not a super
technical question, guys. As a business
consultant, you should have some kind of
highle opinion on when rag should be
appropriate or not because you should
understand what rag is for. And that's
just one example. I'm not picking on
rag. It's just an actual example I've
seen. So, it was top of mind. In other
words, when you are thinking about
consultancies, one of the things that is
a a a drawback is to use your existing
distribution and AI wash. And yet, the
strength is having that distribution and
being in the consulting business. And so
this should encourage you if you are not
yet in a position where you have an
existing book of business but you aspire
to be a consultant or you perhaps wish
to join a consultancy as an AI expert
they need people like you and if you
want to start your business it's never
been a better time but you have to start
it on the basis of stronger knowledge
and this brings me to the second sort of
bigger point the first point was talking
about the state of the market what
existing consultancies are doing now I
want to talk about this idea that we
might start from scratch and what does
that take and how do you start from
scratch or even how do existing
consultancies retool? What are the key
skills and uh key proof points they need
to deploy to have a truly A+
relationship with their clients around
AI? The first thing is to get specific.
So much of AI washing, you can tell it's
AI washing because it's vague in
general. It's this sort of
buzzwordfilled
uh consultant language that makes sense
maybe in the boardroom, but once you try
and drill down to what it means for an
actual individual contributor, you
couldn't say what it meant. And so if
you want to talk about the agentic mesh,
right, what does that mean? No one
really knows what the agentic mesh
means. It's just a term that consultants
made up. There are other terms that
consultants tend to throw around like AI
powered that also don't mean a whole
lot. And so I like to suggest if you are
trying to succeed long-term as a
consultant, not just sell the book of
business, right? Like you're if you just
try and sell to the board, you can use
terms like that. Most of the boards will
buy it. But if you want to actually
deliver the service, you have to get to
the point where you can plausibly talk
about what you will build in a way that
is attractive and clear and specific.
And when people are choosing between
different proposals, you know, often
times the assumption is, well, they
choose on price and so we need to be
competitive on price and we'll be fine.
AI actually opens up more price
headroom. You need to compete on
intelligence delivery in a way that is
plausible. And you need to show you can
do it by showing a specific domain
expertise that goes beyond AI. And I
find that this is where a lot of
consultants, whether they're established
or whether they're new, go astray. They
tend to say, "We're going to zero in on
AI. All we do is AI." But AI is it's
hard to put your fingers on. I've talked
about that already in this video. It's a
general purpose technology. You can do
it with development. You can do it with
process change. You can do it with a
dozen other things in the consulting
world, marketing, etc. You need to pick
a particular domain that you can own.
You need to pick a particular domain
where if you have an opinion on how AI
agents should be deployed in that
domain, you you should be believed. You
have authority there. You have a decade
of experience. That is part of why when
I speak about product and AI, I tend to
have very strong opinions because I did
product management for a long long time.
When I speak about founding an AI, I
tend to have opinions because I have
found it before etc. I think the thing
that I want to call out is don't be
afraid of that background in yourself.
You are not so much pivoting into AI as
you are letting AI grow like like a
strangler fig tree which grows all
around the existing tree until
eventually it like transforms it and or
kills it. Let's just be honest. Uh but
but you're growing a new AI product
surface, a new AI service offering, a
new AI way of thinking around what you
have already done. And that current
experience is critical. A strangler fig
tree cannot grow without a tree to grow
around. Similarly, you can't really sell
your AI expertise without something that
is a core domain expertise besides AI.
The best consultant engagements that I
have seen come from that core of
expertise and then there's a deeply
thought out AI enabling layer that helps
that particular domain expertise go
farther. And I'm not talking go a little
bit farther. I'm talking significantly
farther. This is part of why the
software IDE market has exploded. IDE,
as hard as it is to believe, development
environments as a SAS business were not
an attractive business at all for a long
long long time until cursor came along.
Cursor absolutely transformed them
because it put AI at the heart of a
previously boring business, but it owned
the previously boring business. It is a
development environment at core. I'm not
here to make a video about cursor's
product strategy, but I think that that
picture in your head is useful as you
think about the kind of deep engagement
and the deep mesh that you need to have
to borrow a term between the domain
knowledge that you have and the
expertise on AI that you need to deploy.
You cannot be a general AI consultant.
You need to be a specific one. Even if
you have multiple expertise levels,
multiple domains you can play in, it is
stronger to have three or four specific
offerings around AI that you're good at
than to just make it one general
offering. It also gives you more pricing
power and more opportunity to earn the
right to win because you are going to be
able to say, you want to talk about SEO
in the age of AI, I have a whole thing
for that. I know SEO, I've known SEO for
a decade. These are the 15 principles
I'm laying out in the new world. this is
how we're going to do SEO in the age of
AI. This is how we're going to protect
your search traffic. This is how we're
going to get you sort of situated with
large language models, etc. It's the
specificity that helps you win. Another
piece I want to call out, we've talked
about distribution, we've talked about
AI washing, we've talked about the
importance of specificity, which I think
is like if I had to pick one thing, I
would call out you got to do that. I
want to call out also it is really
important in AI to be a part of the
value chain. You need to understand
where you can make friends and influence
people inside the consulting world
because people who consult tend to only
have a piece of the puzzle if they're
doing specifics. And so they need
friends and partners. You need to be
able to say, "My buddy James is going to
come in and help you with this other
piece. I'm maybe not the best in the
world at that, but James is incredible
and James can help you. We can come in
on this engagement together." Have a lot
of James's. have a lot of people you can
say my buddy is really good at this and
you know how you get that this is this
is yet another point in in the theme of
what makes a good consultant you put
your work out there you have got to be
able to talk very specifically about the
kind of work you do and yes I know
you're under NDA sometimes I get it you
can still even if you can't do a
specific case study talk very
specifically about the kind of work you
do in a way that lets other people
remember you you can be their James. You
can be the person they tap on the
shoulder for. I guess we're following
this example, the SEO example. Hey, I'm
not an SEO guy, but my my buddy here is
an SEO guy. Bring him in, right? You
want to be that person, too. That is
part of how you develop your pipeline.
And the reason why that's especially
important in the age of AI is that AI is
that general purpose technology that
means that organizations need AI
everywhere they look. and they may want
to write multiple engagements to help
them get there. I've seen over and over
again that an organization will pick a
vertical and they'll get into the
vertical and they'll say okay we got to
expand from here and they'll want to
write write a wider engagement and
sometimes they want to write with the
consultancy they know distribution but
they write outside the expertise of that
consultancy and so you need a friend at
that point and you get friends by
winning at developing and distributing
your content so people know you and kind
of can map you. It's not just a content
game. It's also a social media game.
It's also a game of like referring
people where you meet people on
engagements and then you keep up with
them. It's all of those old tricks. It's
just especially important now. And I
think the content piece is especially
important to signal credibility because
I regret to tell you, as I'm sure you're
aware, when there whenever there's a
gigantic 0 to630 billion number, as
we're having with AI consulting, it gets
big. It gets big fast. It draws
fraudsters. It draws huers. It draws
people who sell snake oil in the AI
sense. And so people, even people who
are trying to hire consultants have
their hackles up, let alone other
consultants who are trying to size up
and say, "Is this person someone I
actually want to deliver with?" So the
more you can be clear and specific in
the way you talk about yourself, the
less likely you are to be mistaken for a
fraud. And people sometimes fight me on
this if they're thinking about going
into consulting because they say, "I
want to be everything for everybody. I
want to be general enough. I don't want
to close the door on potential
pipeline." I get it. I get that you want
the business off the ground, but if
you're too general with the content you
put out there and the messaging you put
out there, people can't tell the
difference between you and 600,000 other
AI consultants on the web, you just look
like one of the crowd. Even if you have
genuine expertise, maybe your expertise
in AI is AI for fitness centers. I don't
know. Maybe it's AI for clinics. Uh
maybe it's AI for grocery stores.
Whatever it is, own the domain expertise
that you're talking about. lean into
that area of focus. And what's
interesting is that boldness enables you
eventually to claim adjacent verticals.
And so if you lean into your area of
focus, let's say that you're super
focused and you're really really good,
we'll just pursue the SEO piece. You're
really good at SEO now, like what
happens to Google right now in the age
of AI, what happens to your placements
inside GPT. I've actually made videos
about this. Maybe this is why this is
top of mind. I also used to work in
marketing at gray gray hairs and sat
mini shares. So if you were that person,
you can then extend to paid marketing
eventually and say AI for paid
marketing. You can extend AI for social
marketing. If you stack up enough of
those chips, you're eventually going to
become an AI powered consultancy for
marketing that is deeply plausible. But
it tends to come more plausibly by
stacking those individual verticals as
opposed to just coming over the top. and
existing consultants that have
distribution relationships framed around
marketing are going to try and AI wash
their way over the top and almost always
what I see when I look under the covers
of those decks is they don't know what
they're talking about maybe in one or
two subverticals they have one person
who's good but like for the most part
they do not know what they are talking
about and that costs all of us trust it
costs trust in AI as a whole there's a
reason that AI is something that people
are skeptical about I do not think it's
hard to tell wise on polls. Polls are
notoriously unresponsive to rationale
like you can't you you can speculate
about why people answer something but
you don't know. I am speculating. It is
not just a distrust in AI as a new
technology we don't understand. It is
also a distrust especially if you look
at business polling and sort of business
surveys. It is a distrust in AI because
consultants have burned bridges with bad
implementations. I know consultants who
make their entire living cleaning up
after other consultants messes. There's
going to be a lot more of that. I don't
want there to be, but it burns the
bridges. And so one of the negative
consequences of AI washing of what we
talked about at the top of this video is
that if you do that, you don't only
poison enterprise value for your own
business. You poison value for the
entire ecosystem because you teach
people that AI is for frauds. AI is for
hypocrites. AI is for people who will
tell you they'll do the AI thing and
then you look under the covers and it's
not really it's not really AI, right?
Like this reminds me of Amazon when
Amazon would boldly claim they used AI
and special fancy scales and cameras at
their just walk out grocery stores
actually used those grocery stores back
in the day and it turned out they never
got it to work. It was never really AI.
It was always a bunch of people sitting
in India looking at videos and that
happens a lot and I think people are
sensitive to that in AI and I think
there should be and it's up to us if we
are working with clients to have a
different perspective and show that you
can be authentic and be yourself. The
last thing that I want to call out is
templatization and this is something
that you know we have gone after for a
long time. If if you've ever done
consulting people talk about
templatizing your services all the time.
The difference with AI is that AI
enables you to do much much more
interesting things with templates.
Prompts can be living templates.
Templates can be extended through
prompting at the end of the end of the
engagement surface with the client.
Templates themselves become more
customized and distinct service
offerings because AI makes it so easy to
extend tokens to the value chain that
the customer is bringing. This is
reflective of the fact that software
itself is changing. software can be more
customized now because it is so cheap to
write code. Similarly, consulting can be
more focused on individual customers
than was practical before and still
utilize the power of templates because
it's cheaper to customize those
templates. Now, that doesn't mean that
you should forego templates. It doesn't
mean you should give up on templates.
Templates are still really important
because they enable you to say
distinctly what you intend to serve and
how you intend to provide value in a way
that is packaged up that a customer can
understand. Customers are already
struggling with AI. They are wrestling
with AI. They need AI to be clearer.
Packaging is part of how you do that.
And the way you power packaging is
through templates. But it's not just
your your grandfather's templates from
the old consultancy days in the 70s.
These are templates that you can extend
with AI. You can do that through
prompting. You can do that by working to
customize a particular offering after
you listen to the customer and pull the
transcript. There's a dozen ways to do
it, but the point is the template still
matters and customizing matters more
than ever. So wrapping all of this up,
if you were to look at the picture of an
AI A+ powered consultant, they're
specific. They know their domain.
They're not afraid to use it and deeply
wrap it into AI. Number two, they have
distribution. They have figured out how
to build relationships in the book of
business. And this sounds
self-fulfilling, but I don't think it
is. I think that distribution is one of
those things that consultants are able
to achieve when they are able to
demonstrate disproportionate value even
to one customer to start and they
generate word of mouth and referral. So
distribution does matter as a marker of
authenticity and a marker of good work
especially if you can maintain and grow
that distribution in the age of AI. they
are clearly differentiated clearly
differentiated from other work and
having your own domain helps with that
but so does explaining how you engage
differently otherwise you're just going
to wash into the background of the
hundreds of thousands of other AI
consultants they define the part of the
value chain that they go after and they
have partners they can bring in for
other parts of the value chain whom they
trust whom they have working
relationships with they put their stuff
out there which is part of how they
build that relationship and you can see
it specific and actionable without
breaking NDA They templatize. They
templatize. They templatize so that when
you want to talk about what they offer,
they have packages and templates that
help you easily understand where the
edges of their engagements are and where
they're not. So, there you go. Those are
my tips for being a strong consultant.
I'm sure there are others. If you have
examples of positive behavioral traits
that make great AI consultants, I'd love
to hear them. Let me know. Throw them in
the comments. It's really critical to
get this right. I think that the thing
that I want to come back to is that if
we get AI consultants wrong, we end up
risking poisoning the AI ecosystem and
nobody wants that. So take the time,
bring your real agame, dive in on
expertise, and have