Steph’s Digital Ambassador (00:00):
Today we're really getting into something pretty fundamental. It's this question, if you run a boutique consultancy, a high-end service, what exactly are clients paying for anymore? Especially now with AI capable of churning out insights that well used to be your bread and butter. We've got a load of source material we're diving into, especially some really eyeopening stuff from a recent lead gen challenge. It shows this shocking shift in what clients expect right now.
Andrew’s Mindmate (00:27):
Yeah, and look, this isn't some academic debate about the future. Five years down the line, this is happening now on Zoom calls. It's genuinely an existential thing for many firms. So our mission today in this deep dive is really to nail down what skills aren't becoming a commodity. And the core thing, I mean it screams from the sources, is this AI can do the analysis, the data crunching, finding patterns, writing the reports. It does it faster, arguably better sometimes than any human
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (00:53):
Team. Okay, hold on, let's unpack that right away. Saying the value of information is zero. That feels well, pretty extreme, doesn't it? I get that information is commoditized, but what about the consultant's role in curating it, interpreting it, making sense of it for the client? We've all seen those dense reports, right? Accurate data maybe, but totally confusing. Surely interpretation still counts.
Andrew’s Mindmate (01:13):
It counts, but it's marginal Value is racing towards zero. Look, interpretation is still needed. Yeah, but increasingly that's becoming about how good you are at writing prompts for the ai. What AI cannot do, what it fundamentally can't replicate is taking the human risk only the consequences of a tough decision. So if your whole pitch, your value was tied up in delivering that information, the slick report, the big slide deck that's basically reproducible for free. Now, the only things left. The truly defensible skills, the things worth that premium fee, they boil down to two things, original human judgment and crucially, accountability management. These are the pillars. This is what we mean when we talk about being an original intelligence operator in OIO,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (01:54):
Right? The OIO concept. And we're seeing this shift happen almost absurdly fast, even at the consumer end. Tell us that story from the lead challenge, the one about people sending bots instead of showing up themselves.
Andrew’s Mindmate (02:05):
Oh, it's wild. So this person running a virtual challenge, a professional development thing, notice something weird. High level people were signing up, paying biding that we weren't actually attending the live sessions. Instead, they were sending AI bots, these sophisticated tools designed to listen in, take notes, summarize the whole thing. He was literally having to identify and kick these AI entities out of his zoom room.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (02:31):
These are all people that send their ai. He actually said that. Wow, that's kind of mind blowing. It completely reframes how we think about automation hitting the professional world if AI can already handle that basic stuff. Transcription, summarizing, capturing initial ideas, which is, let's face it. Often the work of junior consultants, it signals that the automation of just capturing data that's basically
Andrew’s Mindmate (02:51):
Done. Exactly. Think about it from the client's perspective. Why pay thousands for a junior consultant to sit in meetings, take notes, write summaries when a tool can do it automatically, instantly, probably more accurately for transcription anyway, the market's already decided it's not paying premium rates for just passively gathering information anymore, which is why this pivot away from just delivering data towards judgment and managing action. It has to be fast, like yesterday, fast.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (03:18):
Okay, so let's define AI's role more clearly in this new world. You're framing it as this advanced emotionless analyst. If AI takes over the data function, how should consultants think about it? Is it a tool, an assistant, or is it fundamentally a threat?
Andrew’s Mindmate (03:30):
It's neither an assistant nor a threat really. It's your new CFO, but an emotionless one. There's a great story in the source material that illustrates this perfectly. A managing director takes over a huge region for a Fortune 500 company. This region was a disaster losing millions year after year for five straight years. And this md, he was the 10th person they'd sent in to try and fix it. Imagine the pressure, the history, the fear baked into that situation. He turned it profitable in four and a half months,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (04:00):
Five years of losses, 10 failed attempts turned round in under five months. That's incredible. What was the key? What did he do differently?
Andrew’s Mindmate (04:07):
It wasn't just him. It was the person he brought with him his CFO. This CFO had won very specific, very powerful skill, total neutrality. He presented data completely devoid of emotion. It didn't matter if the numbers showed they'd made a million or lost a million. His delivery, his affect exactly the same. His job was purely clinical present. The numbers lay, say three to five scenarios. Okay, if we go down path A here, the likely upsides here are the downsides, path B, here's the potential, here's the risk, and then he just stepped back. His final line was always the same. You're the boss, you've got the p and l accountability. You decide,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (04:42):
Right, p and l accountability. Let's just clarify that for everyone listening, profit and loss responsibility. Why is that specific responsibility inherently human? Why can't AI just take that on too? If the analysis is perfect?
Andrew’s Mindmate (04:53):
Because p and l accountability isn't just about the numbers. It's about owning the risk, owning the potential failure, the political fallout inside the company, the reaction from the market outside the human cost that CFO, he provided the perfect clean analysis, the raw insights, the scenarios. But what he did crucially was strip out the fear, the bias, the historical baggage that had probably paralyzed the previous nine MDs. AI does the same thing now. It delivers that clinical fearless analysis, but it leaves that final high stakes, high risk decision, the one with real consequences to the human who actually has to carry that burden.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (05:30):
And AI does this not just without emotion, but at incredible speed and scale. Let's take that classic example, the cost cutting consultant. That whole niche seems particularly vulnerable, right? How has AI just decimated that traditional model?
Andrew’s Mindmate (05:42):
Oh, it's instant obsolescence, total vaporization. Think about how it used to work. A cost cutting project meant teams of people, months of painstaking manual work going through every single invoice, utilities, phones, suppliers, food services, everything looking for tiny errors, overcharges clauses and contracts that weren't being met. Their fee structure. Often they took like 50% of whatever savings they found for the client.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (06:07):
A model built entirely on the friction, the sheer time and effort needed to find that information
Andrew’s Mindmate (06:11):
Precisely. And that friction, it's now zero gone. You don't need people for that review phase anymore. Not like before. A client can literally gather up all their digital contracts, invoices, term sheets, dump them into a sophisticated AI model, within seconds, maybe minutes for a huge batch, the AI will tell them exactly where they're overpaying, where the terms are off, where the savings opportunities lie. The Hume consultant in that initial analysis and detection phase, instantly redundant.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (06:38):
Okay, but AI isn't perfect. This comes up again and again. The hallucination factor, as you call it, AI is sophisticated, sure, but it can just confidently make things up, right? That brings the human back in, doesn't it?
Andrew’s Mindmate (06:51):
Absolutely. And this is critical. It's the built-in flaw that makes relying purely on ai, incredibly risky, like the source material warns AI writes beautifully, sounds, incredibly confident, formats things perfectly, but it makes stuff up. It will confidently cite quotes that don't exist, attribute them to people who never said them or present data that's just plain wrong statistically or factually.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (07:13):
So knowing that AI will inevitably hallucinate sometimes, what's the very first thing? A human consultant, an OIO needs to do the non-negotiable step,
Andrew’s Mindmate (07:22):
Verify, verify everything. That's the first immediate application of that non commoditized human judgment. Any consultant using AI has an absolute duty to check the sources, validate the facts presented by the machine. You have to constantly ask that critical question, not just of people, but of the AI's output itself. How do you know this is true? Show me the source. Let me see the raw data. If you skip that verification step, you risk delivering a beautiful, efficient, but potentially completely wrong analysis to your client. You're getting paid for the judgment. You apply to the AI's output, not just for the output itself.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (07:56):
Okay, so let's assume the analysis is perfect. It's verified. It's essentially free or very low cost thanks to ai. So what are clients really paying for when they shell out premium fees, say $5,000 a month, that kind of level, because the sources are clear. Just paying the fee doesn't mean the client actually does anything. Implementation fails a lot,
Andrew’s Mindmate (08:13):
Right? And this brings us squarely into what we call the red team argument. The red team's job is to challenge assumptions, find the weaknesses, poke holes in the plan. And the biggest failure point for consultants historically and right now, it's rarely the quality of the analysis. It has almost always been client in action. The data we saw from that challenge, it confirms its starkly. Clients paying good money, thousand dollars setup fees, 2000 alum programs, they're consistently not implementing the advice they're given.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (08:42):
That seems like such a waste for everyone involved. Why pay for a solution and then just not use it? Is it about the money itself or is something deeper going on?
Andrew’s Mindmate (08:51):
It's the accountability gap. They pay for the insight. They get the insight. Maybe they even admire the insight and then they file it away. They don't act unless there's a human involved, actively holding them accountable, someone checking in, pushing them, asking the tough questions. Hey, you said you'd do X by Friday, it's Tuesday. What happened to what got in the way? And the core problem here, this is critical. It's usually not that the concepts are too hard to understand. The challenge is almost always behavioral.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (09:16):
Can you give us a concrete example where the behavior part completely dwarfs the technical side?
Andrew’s Mindmate (09:21):
Financial planning is the absolute classic case. Think about saving for retirement or even just managing a monthly budget. The math involved, it's not rocket science, it's basic arithmetic stuff. Anyone with a decent education can handle. The difficulty is a hundred percent in the behavioral change. Why doesn't someone follow a perfectly sensible, logical financial plan? The real reasons are emotional. It's avoidance, it's low self-belief, feeling like they can't stick to it. It's deep seated disorganization or it's major life stuff competing for attention and resources. Maybe aging parents needing financial help or teenagers demanding constant time and money.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (09:58):
So the consultant gets hired to solve what looks like a spreadsheet problem, but the client is actually stuck in this emotional battle, maybe one they aren't even fully aware of.
Andrew’s Mindmate (10:07):
That's the core disconnect and it's all amplified by the general environment right now. What our sources call the trust deficit. Trust in institutions and experts, even in the future. It's taken a massive hit in recent years. Global events, uncertainty. Most people deep down are operating from a place of fear.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (10:24):
And fear leads to paralysis, right?
Andrew’s Mindmate (10:26):
Infusion. Exactly. A confused mind simply doesn't act. It freezes. It defaults to the status quo. So the main reason people don't buy the help they need or don't implement the plan they paid for often is because they don't trust themselves to actually see it through. You see this particularly in larger organizations, people might subconsciously view themselves as well, a slave working for the master, their employer, the system. They lack that internal conviction, that confidence to really commit to a big potentially disruptive change, whether it's personal or organizational. So if you as a consultant don't address that fundamental behavioral barrier first, the most brilliant AI analysis in the world is just going to become another beautifully formatted report gathering dust, and it actually makes the client feel worse.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (11:11):
Okay, so if AI is handling the analysis and the real human challenge is navigating the client's internal world, their behaviors, their fears, then that traditional consulting model, the here's the answer, now go do it. Model,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (11:23):
Right?
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (11:24):
It's fundamentally broken, isn't it? So what's the OIO mandate? What does the original intelligence operator do now? What's the future role?
Andrew’s Mindmate (11:31):
The mandate is clear. AI forces this pivot. Boutique consultants must become coaches and transformation managers. The value proposition shifts completely. It's no longer about what brilliant insight you deliver. It's about how effectively you guide the client through the messy, difficult human process of change required to actually use that insight. That's the OIO mandate. Use AI for the clinical analysis, use your human skills for the behavioral heavy lifting,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (12:00):
And that demands a totally different communication style, right? The old way was very directive. We analyzed it. Here's our recommendation, implement it. How does the new coach consultant talk to clients to build that clarity, that ownership they need to act.
Andrew’s Mindmate (12:12):
It's fundamentally different. It has to be collaborative, empowering, transparent. You're completely open about the data, where it came from, what the AI suggests, but you always defer the final decision to the client. The conversation shifts from giving advice to facilitating their thinking. It sounds more like, okay, here's all the data we gathered. Here's the analysis the AI ran. Here are a few different perspectives, maybe from the ai, maybe from my network, and based on all that, here's my professional judgment considering the market context. But, and this is the crucial part, you need to arrive at the conclusion that feels right for you for your situation. The coach's job isn't to provide the answer, it's to augment the client's own thinking process. You ask the questions that help them have their own breakthrough, find their own clarity because only then will they truly own the decision and therefore own the action that follows.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (13:06):
So the fee structure changes too. It's not an analysis fee anymore. It's a transformation fee. Let's go back to that cost cutting example. AI finds the savings in minutes. Where does the human OIO actually earn their premium fee? Now, what's the chargeable work?
Andrew’s Mindmate (13:20):
The human earns the fee by managing the behavioral science of implementation. Okay, AI spots the potential savings. Fantastic, but what can't AI do first? It can't handle the delicate human task of renegotiating rates with a supplier you've worked with for 10 years. That takes nuance, relationship management, maybe some tough negotiation skills. That's human behavioral stuff. Second, and this is often much harder, especially in big organizations. AI cannot manage the actual process of vendor onboarding or broader change management.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (13:51):
Explain that vendor onboarding part. It sounds bureaucratic, but I suspect you mean something deeper like ingrained habits.
Andrew’s Mindmate (13:57):
Exactly. It's about organizational inertia. Imagine that big school district example. The AI finds a new food service vendor that could save 20%. Great. But think about the reality on the ground. The kitchen staff, the administrators, the delivery drivers, they've all got established routines. They have relationships with the old vendors, people there are unspoken rules, ways, things have always been done. These hatts run deep actually changing those day-to-day behaviors, managing the resistance that inevitably pops up, retraining people, dealing with the fear of the unknown. That comes with any change, that process, managing that human friction and guiding the organization through it. That's the transformation management. That's the new value. That's what you charge for.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (14:38):
So the value isn't in finding the saving anymore because that's quick and easy. With ai, the value is in the slow, sometimes painful work of actually embedding that change, making it stick within the organization's culture and processes.
Andrew’s Mindmate (14:51):
Precisely. The human coach, the OIO, takes the AI's analysis as the starting point. Then they provide the structure, the accountability framework. They hold the client's feet to the fire kindly but firmly, and they help the client break through their own internal resistance, their own behavioral inertia. If you just stick to being the data person, eventually the client's just going to get a cheaper AI subscription and try and likely fail to implement it themselves.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (15:17):
Okay, so if accountability, managing behavior and building trust of the new core skills, how do we actually build that trust quickly, especially if clients are skeptical or fearful? It sounds like we need to almost resist our own expertise. Resist jumping to conclusions too fast in the diagnosis phase.
Andrew’s Mindmate (15:35):
That's exactly it. We have to fight the consultant's natural urge to pattern match. After you've worked in a specific field for years, you develop this ability. You walk into a meeting, hear five minutes of the problem, and you'd think, ah, I know exactly what this is. I've seen this pattern a dozen times. Here's the solution. That moment, that's actually the danger zone.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (15:54):
And what's the biggest mistake the consultant can make right then? Even if they're technically correct about the solution?
Andrew’s Mindmate (15:59):
Blurting out the answer, just telling the client, okay, here's what you need to do. Why? Because the client won't accept the prescription if they don't first trust the diagnosis. People need to feel heard, understood, thoroughly examined before. They'll commit to something that's often difficult, expensive, and requires real change on their part. Skipping that diagnosis step, it creates psychological resistance.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (16:24):
There's that powerful story you mentioned from the sources, the Galway sickness. Can you share that? It really illustrates this point.
Andrew’s Mindmate (16:30):
Yeah, it's a perfect analogy for this psychological need for diagnosis. Imagine you're feeling awful. You're in Galway, Ireland. There's a known stomach bug going around, likely from the water, everyone knows about it. You drag yourself to the doctor. Wait an hour and a half. Finally, you get in the doctor. He's already seen 50 people with the exact same symptoms that morning. He knows precisely what it is. So without even taking your temperature, without asking what you ate, without checking your blood pressure, he just scribbles a prescription. He says, here, run down to the pharmacy quick. He closes in 15 minutes.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (17:02):
And even though he's right about the medicine and he is trying to be efficient, you leave feeling dismissed, untrusting
Andrew’s Mindmate (17:09):
Completely dismissed. You feel like a number, not a patient. He skipped the human connection part. He prioritized his pattern recognition and speed over making you feel diagnosed and cared for. And because you don't trust the process by which he arrived at the prescription, maybe you hesitate to take the medicine. Maybe you suffer longer than you needed to. The parallel in consulting and sales is direct. Think about top performers when they start out. They ask tons of questions. They listen intently, they succeed, then they get really good. They start seeing the patterns everywhere. They become experts. And what often happens, they stop asking so many questions. They start diagnosing faster, prescribing sooner. And counterintuitively their performance often dips.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (17:48):
They shift from genuine inquiry to just dictating the solution.
Andrew’s Mindmate (17:53):
Exactly. They fall out of that crucial discovery process because they assume they already know. They go from asking, tell me more about that. What's really going on here to declaring? Okay, stop doing that. Start doing this. The role of the coach, the oio O is often to guide the client back to that state of inquiry about their own situation. And for the consultant themselves, it's about returning to the discipline of asking better deeper questions.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (18:16):
Questions
Andrew’s Mindmate (18:16):
That get past the surface level and help the client overcome their own emotional hurdles,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (18:21):
Right? And we have that amazing case study that shows the sheer power of inquiry. Even when the consultant lacks deep domain expertise, the OCLC workflow transformation, this person apparently admitted they had no clue about the specific complex web system they were hired to fix. That sounds terrifying, but it became an advantage.
Andrew’s Mindmate (18:40):
It was their greatest asset because they couldn't rely on preexisting technical knowledge. They had to rely on the pure human skill of asking really good, sometimes really basic questions. The project was huge, complex, bogged down, paralyzed, really. So the first step was just pure discovery, nothing fancy and empty spreadsheet, zero assumptions. They just went to the core team members and started asking, okay, walk me through this process. What exactly do you do here? Why do you do it that way? If you could wave a magic wand and fix one frustrating thing about this tomorrow, what would it be?
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (19:11):
And through that process, they uncovered a system that had just grown organically into total chaos,
Andrew’s Mindmate (19:17):
An absolute tangled mess. Get this for just one website. The client had somehow accumulated over 500 different approval workflows. Just imagine the inefficiency, people approving documents as someone else or maybe three other people had already approved. They found workflows designed to write a document to someone who hadn't even worked there for three years. The consultants judgment based purely on asking why was immediate, okay, no system on earth, no matter how fancy can handle 500 workflows efficiently. This is the problem methodically one by one, asking the team, why do we do this specific step? Is this person's approval actually necessary anymore? What's the worst that happens if we just stopped doing this?
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (19:57):
Wow. And by just applying that relentless structured inquiry, forcing the client team to actually confront their own ingrained processes, they help the team slash those 507 workflows down to just three core operational workflows.
Andrew’s Mindmate (20:12):
Exactly. That's the power of human judgment and structured inquiry completely separate from just crunching data. A project that was stuck for years got streamlined in basically three intense days of facilitated discovery and the side effect team morale shot up cohesion improved because people finally understood why things were so messed up and felt empowered to fix it. The consultant built authority not on knowing the tech better than the client, but on mastering the process of asking the right questions and having the courage to challenge the status quo.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (20:42):
That leads perfectly into the ultimate expression of this non commoditized judgment, something AI definitely can't do. The Bosch negotiation story, this required resisting corporate pressure group think fear.
Andrew’s Mindmate (20:53):
Yeah, this is the asset test for original intelligence and action.
(20:56):
The situation was pretty stark. The company was making $500,000 in revenue from Bosch, a major client. Sounds good, right? But when they dug into it, they realized they were actually losing a hundred thousand dollars on that half million in revenue. Why? Because over years previous managers had kept giving concessions, discounts, agreeing to unfavorable terms just to keep the big name client happy. It'd become unprofitable. Now, an AI analysis, it would just report the $500 K revenue stream maybe flagged the low margin. The human consultant, the OIO, looked at the whole picture and applied judgment. This isn't sustainable. We should actually walk away from this revenue,
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (21:32):
Walk away from half a million dollars from a name brand client that takes debts. No algorithm optimized purely for revenue, would ever recommend that?
Andrew’s Mindmate (21:38):
Absolutely not. An algorithm would likely try to optimize the existing losing arrangement. The human judgment here was based on profit integrity, long-term strategy and positioning. Not just short-term revenue targets driven by fear. The decision was made. Tel Bosch, the terms had to change significantly or they'd have to part ways. It meant resisting that powerful corporate fear of never lose a major client. They held firm on the need for a profitable relationship, valuing their service correctly
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (22:06):
And the outcome. What happened when they took that calculated very human risk.
Andrew’s Mindmate (22:11):
Bosch walked initially, six months went by. Then Bosch came back. They'd apparently gone out, tried cheaper alternatives and found the quality of service just wasn't there. They came back to the consultant ready to talk, and they ended up agreeing to terms that were actually better than the original ones the consultant had proposed they paid more. That outcome required a level of strategic judgment, market confidence, and frankly courage to resist immediate fear and pressure that well no AI model currently possesses AI optimizes based on the data it has. The OIO applies judgment based on context, future positioning and core principles like profitability. So look, it all kind of crystallizes, doesn't it? The future for a boutique consultant isn't just about becoming a coach, it's about becoming an original intelligence operator. Someone who uses AI as that incredibly powerful analytical engine, the emotionless CFO, if you like, but then applies their unique, verifiable human judgment and provides the accountability of the coach to manage that critical, messy behavioral transformation piece.
(23:09):
That's what ensures clients actually move from insight to action, from paralysis to results, just conforming, relying on easily replicated information, that's a dead end. Now your only defensible position is out there on the edge delivering the value only that original human intelligence can bring. AI has completely commoditized knowledge work as we knew it. Building a successful high value boutique business, say a $1 million firm isn't about knowing more facts or having more data than your clients anymore. That game is definitively over. It's now entirely about asking better questions. Questions that cut through the noise, that build deep trust because you're diagnosing thoroughly, not just jumping to answers. And it's about having the skill and the courage to guide clients through the behavioral change that actually produces results. That's the defensible value.
Steph’s Digital Ambassador (23:52):
That's the path forward. The path of the original intelligence operator, keep challenging the consensus and focus on delivering that transformation.
