Professionals Displaced by Their Own Tools

The problems ahead are long-horizon and cross-disciplinary. Solving them takes judgment built over careers: people who understand risk, finance, regulation, operations and the human side of institutions, and who can work across all of them at once.

Those are precisely the people now being displaced.

The paradox

AI is compressing billable hours. It is commoditising analysis that once took a team a week. The tools were sold as assistants to professionals; in practice, they are steadily replacing the work that professionals were paid for.

The result is a growing pool of highly capable knowledge workers who are underutilised and undercompensated. Not because their thinking has lost value, but because the structures that paid for it are breaking. The consulting profession, as it has been organised, is under existential pressure.

What gets lost

When a firm shrinks, its expertise does not disappear. It scatters. Experienced people go solo, take on smaller work, or step away altogether. Their capability is still there, but it is no longer connected to the problems that need it most.

Working together outside a firm is hard. Who validates the work? Who gets paid, and how much? Who owns the contribution once it is made? Without answers, collaboration slides into overhead, disputes and opacity, and capable people stay on the sidelines.

The problem, stated plainly

We are losing our best problem solvers at the moment we need them most. The world faces complex, long-horizon problems, while the professionals equipped to work on them are being pushed out of the structures that once brought them together.

The question I keep asking is how a loosely connected, cross-disciplinary group of professionals could work together on problems that actually matter, be paid fairly for what they contribute, and have that contribution recognised, without having to rebuild the old firm around them.