Hamel Husain, a decade-plus AI consultant himself, argues the hottest job in the economy is usually a bad hire — with two exceptions. ~3 minutes on his own channel.
Why hiring an AI consultant usually fails
- The problems you had before — talent, organizational, skill issues — are still there when the consultant leaves
- AI’s whole point is to remove the middleman: you express what you want in natural language and inject your domain knowledge directly into the tool
- If they just implement and walk away, you can’t maintain what they built — worst case you keep paying them, i.e. prompting a consultant instead of prompting an AI
- His track record: in over a decade, third-party AI implementations he’s seen don’t work
When a consultant is worth it
- Education: the consultant up-levels your entire team and makes themselves obsolete — you keep the skills after they’re gone
- Skin in the game: they don’t get paid unless they affect your bottom line (increase revenue or decrease costs), demonstrated at a quality bar — aligned incentives
The alternative
- Learn AI yourself — it’s the most accessible technology ever created; you mostly need to learn how to talk to it
- Coding skills help but aren’t required for lots of things; a growth mindset makes effective use tractable with practice
“Instead of prompting an AI, you don’t want to be prompting a consultant.”