Business owners — especially small and medium businesses — don’t like turning to business consulting. Because of ego, money, time, and disappointments from past attempts.
As AI enters our lives in all areas, it’s natural for business owners to think that soon an AI agent will arrive that does the consultant’s work at better quality, for almost no money, within two days, without mental confusion, and without anyone knowing they don’t know how to find solutions alone.
It won’t happen!
True, I’m not a futurist and even futurists avoid expressing opinions on AI development pace, but even Claude admitted to me this won’t happen anytime soon.
Here are the reasons:
- Business consulting process begins with questioning, diagnosis, or mapping in some consultants’ terminology. An AI agent won’t know how to adapt questions to your business and personality and change questions and style during questioning, based on your answers, body language, or intonation. It also won’t know how to address cultural nuances.
- The AI agent also won’t know how to distinguish how accurate, true, complete the information you provided in questioning is, whether you’re unaware of your real problems, or just telling stories.
- The AI agent will have trouble absorbing relevant business data if it’s not in a structured format it recognizes. Even a financial balance sheet, if not in appropriate format, will be a mystery to it, not to mention Excel tables that only those who prepared them know what they meant to record.
- Even if your tables are well-built, some relevant information might be missing — for example, product details in deals or hours required to produce/supply a product. The AI agent might get stuck or invent “acceptable” data according to what it learned and reach delusional conclusions.
- The AI agent won’t know limitations you didn’t discuss initially. It might, for example, suggest working 3 shifts daily 7 days a week and might not even tell you about it unless you ask explicitly.
- AI agents (including chats) learn from millions of documented cases. They can’t be creative. If you have a special problem (and usually you do…), they’ll struggle to find a creative solution tailored to your problem.
- A flesh-and-blood consultant must create a trust relationship as a condition for working with the client. Based on emotional intelligence that no AI agent will ever have, of course.
- Ethical questions arise in everything related to AI. This is one of the most troubling issues for people. Cases have already occurred where chat recommended someone commit suicide and they actually did. True, most leading companies address the issue, but it still poses a threat. Also in business consulting.
- An AI agent will struggle to identify and address organizational problems in the business that affect functioning and business results.
- Even if the AI agent overcomes the previous 9 obstacles and produces a structured, organized, polished document with tables and graphs, how will you know to judge that it’s logical and reasonable?
- Suppose you bet on it being excellent and go to implement it, but ask for accompaniment along the way. It’s simply not built for this.
If you’ve given up the fantasy of using an AI agent, maybe you’d like to talk with a “human agent”…