Use This AI "Teammate" Method To Justify 30% Higher Consulting Fees

How can consultants navigate the AI revolution without becoming AI specialists themselves? This week, Michael is once again joined by , Head of Growth at Consulting Success, to explore how to thrive in the new AI landscape. They dive into the “high tech, high touch” phenomenon, where advanced technology paradoxically increases the demand for genuine human connection, a critical insight for every consultant today.

Michel unpacks his concept of “E-A-T 2.0,” arguing that the focus for building trust is shifting from Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness to Empathy, Authenticity, and Transparency. They discuss practical ways to blend AI’s efficiency with irreplaceable human storytelling and strategic insight, transforming AI from a simple tool into a powerful “teammate.” This episode provides a clear roadmap for leveraging AI to enhance, not replace, your consulting expertise and secure your value in a changing market.

In this episode you will learn:

• The “high tech, high touch” principle and why AI increases the need for human connection.
• How to use AI for efficiency without sacrificing the effectiveness of your expertise.
• The shift from ‘s E-A-T to “E-A-T 2.0”: Empathy, Authenticity, and Transparency.
• Practical ways to blend AI-generated content with human storytelling and insights.
• How to use AI as a “teammate” to challenge your ideas and identify blind spots.
• Using AI to build a stronger, data-driven business case for your consulting services.
• Why mastering AI can help you become a “super consultant” and command higher fees.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

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, Head of Growth at Consulting Success, is a globally recognized marketing leader with 30+ years of experience who spearheads demand generation, helping businesses achieve transformative success. Fortin has driven organic visibility and boosted revenue across 200+ industries, generating over $1B in career revenue and pioneering record-breaking online campaigns. His expertise lies in SEO, branding, AI, and content strategy. The author of several books and published articles, he excels at unlocking untapped growth and helping clients achieve explosive business growth.

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All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Consulting Success podcast. I am very excited today to have Michel Fortin back, joining for round two, I believe, of our podcast episodes and exploration into AI. To start off, Michel, I believe John Naisbitt predicted in 1982 that social media would emerge as a response to technology adoption. And here, you know, we’re seeing kind of the exact same pattern with AI. Can you kind of walk us through what you’re observing in terms of this cyclical, kind of high-tech, high-touch phenomenon?

Sure. Sure. So when I first started out – and by the way, thank you for having me on the podcast. I really appreciate it. One of the first books I ever read when I started in marketing back in the late eighties, early nineties, was a book that was written in the early eighties. It was eighty, yeah, eighty-two, like you said. It was called Megatrends by John Naisbitt. And I loved it because he was a futurist and he’s also talking about consumer behavior, and I was into marketing psychology and all that. That was one of the things that drove me into marketing. And one of his trends, one of his ten megatrends was called “high tech, high touch.” And basically, it meant – or to me, it meant, because it was not exactly the way that he presented it, but I took it as, the more high tech we become, the more high touch we need to be.

And lo and behold, in the nineties, the internet, the commercial internet became the thing. And everybody thought, “Oh, everybody’s going to go digital now. We’re not going to need encyclopedias. We’re going to use Wikipedia. Now we’re going to use the internet. We’re going to use all that stuff.” And people thought that that would destroy the social connection and all that. But lo and behold, social media exploded and grew this need for people to connect. Naisbitt saw that as such a big trend that he actually wrote an entire book on that one megatrend alone, called High Tech/High Touch. And so, I look at it this way: when we look at the way that John Naisbitt presented it, it was that the more high-tech we become – the more efficiency, the more robotic, the more automated we become, which we will inevitably always going to be, that’s the way of evolution in industry is. I mean, look at the Industrial Revolution to today – the more that it will parallel the craving and the desire for human authenticity, connection, and community and all that stuff. And now we are seeing that with AI. We are seeing that pendulum swinging this way where we are getting everything automated. AI is going to be taking over all of our content, all of our marketing. It’s going to be taking over all of our delivery. They’re even talking about robots that will be able to flip burgers and do plumbing in construction. It’s crazy now. You know, automated vehicles, we’re seeing that already. And that will then, I believe – and it is, we’re showing the signs of it with a lot of marketing research – that it’s going to pull the demand for more human connection, more human insights, more human desire to connect and to crave human connection in our marketing and in the world in general, in our consumer behavior.

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[07:07] – Efficiency vs Effectiveness: Using AI Smartly

Yeah, I think the way I look at that is generally across probably hundreds of years, what is scarce or what becomes more scarce, people tend to crave more of. And so, whether that’s gold, you know, positioned as being scarce, and right, people are willing to pay a lot more for it, or there’s a desire for it, whether it’s now with Bitcoin, this idea of scarcity, only twenty-one million in supply, or even recently, you know, a few years back in terms of COVID, that COVID made, in most of the world, it was harder to meet people, right, to be around others. And so therefore, the desire to be with people and that community was even greater. I remember during COVID that in the neighborhood that we used to live in before, at that time, I would get a bunch of guys from the neighborhood together in the evenings, and we would sit in a circle, spaced out for, quote-unquote, you know, “the safety” and all that, having a drink and talking into the evening because we craved that interaction and the community.

And so, I think what you’re just describing is so important that we’ve all seen this trend towards more automation, whether it’s with CRMs and emails and just like all these different tools. So that’s, in some ways, people feel it’s helping us maybe to be more efficient. I don’t believe more efficient necessarily means more effective. Oftentimes people are doing things that make them appear or make them feel like they’re more productive, but they’re not necessarily more effective. But even that to the side, because we’re all going to be getting more and more emails and, you know, phone calls from AI and all this kind of stuff, that I believe, I agree, that will drive the importance and place more importance on doing things in person, finding ways to connect with clients or those that you want to serve in, you know, really human to human, because people will desire that because technology will continue to increase.

Yeah, I’m going to add to that because what you just said is brilliant. The fact that we are using more efficiency or we’re having more efficiency or the opportunity to become more efficient is not an excuse for, but it’s going to allow us to be, more effective. It’s going to allow the things – the things that were taking up so much of our time and opportunities with being inefficient, now we have AI to help us become efficient. Now we have this opportunity to become much more effective with our expertise, our creative insights, our problem-solving capacity. You know, there’s an interesting report that just came out. I think it was, I can’t remember if it was Apple, that they did a test, and it was, I can’t remember, it was a, it was a very big news thing. It was all over the world news a couple of days ago where they said that AI is not capable of reasoning. And what they’d done is that they’d given it all the top models of all the AI models in the world, and they gave it some complex problems. They went from very simple problems to all the way to more complex ones. And when it came to the more complex ones, it still had a hard time solving those because AI is mostly a memory tool. Now, of course, it’s going to grow to a point where it’s going to become more reasoning agents. But right now, it is giving us the opportunity to become more efficient and do a lot of this repetitious stuff that now we can become more effective in our work. For consultants, it’s a boon. It’s like, it’s a big opportunity, right?

[10:39] – E-A-T 2.0: Empathy, Authenticity, Transparency in Content

Let’s talk about you, you’ve mentioned Google’s E-A-T model, if you will, and your belief this is evolving to what you call E-A-T 2.0. So it’s going from expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness to empathy, authenticity, and transparency. Can you just maybe talk a little bit about what’s driving that shift? What does that mean for how we create content or any other kind of application or relevancy for consultants?

Right. Well, this is Naisbitt’s megatrend in action, right? It’s really about where we were before and how, you know, the way that the market corrects itself. And Google is a big, you know, is one of the biggest search engines in the world, still is, although ChatGPT is now a third to Google and YouTube. But, you know, what’s interesting is this. In 2018, there was an explosion of content on the internet, and a lot of people were not- and back then it was not AI, it was just algorithms and software just churning content like crazy. And a lot of it was just, you know, pardon my expression, but it was crap content. So, Google rolled out an algorithm, a Google update that basically penalized content that was not written by an expert, that had, it lacked expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. And the vast majority of the content that got kicked in the pants back then was medical or health, yeah, health-related information. So that’s why they called it the “Medic Update,” although it really affected anything that affected what they call “your money or your life.” And back then, even websites that were created by doctors lost rankings overnight because their content was not provable to be, you know, written by an expert, and it was not authoritative and trustworthy enough.

So now they decided to do things to content like to make sure that it would, we added the bio of the person who’s writing, that it was actually written by a real doctor, that the actual content itself was talked about, linked from, or mentioned on other websites, so it’s a piece of authority, that on the site it was, all the signals that proved that it was trustworthy. Now, when that happened, it solved a lot of issues. In fact, it was pretty good that it happened right before COVID because a lot of health information during COVID came out that was just, a lot of it was just absolutely horrible. But a lot of those sites that were lacking those, that fixed all those, regained their rankings and what not.

But now we’re seeing the same thing happening now with AI content or content that was just spewed out by AI that’s not really helpful. And I believe that Naisbitt’s trend where people are seeking out human interaction, human authenticity, is that they’re going to seek out content that’s not written by AI, or at least that has some human element layer on top of it. It’s kind of funny. I was looking at some stats the other day. I’m subscribed to so many newsletters. And I remember back in the day, a few years ago, where one of the biggest searches on Google was your keyword, and then space, “Reddit,” because people wanted actual information, not from Google and from websites, especially websites that had probably not necessarily the right answers to their question. They actually wanted it from human beings, like conversations going on on Reddit. And then later on, we’ve learned that Google partnered with Reddit in a sixty-million-dollar partnership deal, and all that stuff. And now I just found out that one of the more common searches now is the keyword, space, “not AI,” which is funny. But anyways, it’s neither here nor there.

But the point is this, is that now I think what we’re looking at is, like, now that E-A-T, the basis is pretty fixed now, we’re now seeing a change to a different kind of E-A-T. That’s why I call it E-A-T 2.0. People are not seeking- they are seeking expertise, but they want empathy. They want somebody who actually understands their challenges, their problems, and oftentimes that requires a human being. There’s a lot of stuff that I talk about when I say there’s a bit of a messiness, a beautiful messiness in that human nature, that when we write content, the way we write, the way we express our content and our expertise that can be done in the way where people understand that, like, “Wow, they get me, they understand me.”

So, for example, I went to this SEO conference a couple of years ago, and somebody on stage said, “Oh, we need to start labeling our content as ‘made with AI’ if we want to, you know, kind of like thinking about the Medic Update.” And I kind of said, “No, completely. Like we need to understand that everything is going to be created by AI.”

[15:34] – Blending AI with Human Stories for Impactful Content

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a newsletter actually recently that I used to, that I was receiving, a financial one, they would always put, “you know, this image was created with AI.” And I noticed over the last month that’s all gone.

Yeah.

I think it’s just everyone understands that AI is, is kind of, it’s latched onto or made its way into all aspects of content and text. So finish that thought because I want to, I have a follow-up question for you on this, Michel, yeah.

Sure. So, what we can do now is layer the humanness on top of AI content. We can talk about our own stories, we talk about behind the scenes, we talk about some of our vulnerabilities, or we talk about, we do a lot of storytelling with our case studies. We also connect with our audience a little bit better. Sometimes we just need to add the fact that some parts of it are actually written by human beings. Or like we have a piece of content that’s AI, but if it says it’s been reviewed, edited by, or augmented – I call that, you know, human-augmented content – it’s where we’re going to add that human layer.

And you mentioned something at the very beginning where you talked about where people were asking you if we’re teaching people to become AI consultants. You know, I look at this as a spectrum. You’ve got those that are completely AI, they use AI for everything. And then you’ve got the old-school consultants who are human, but human everything, and they’re like, they’re Luddites, they’re very technophobic, and they’d rather not use it. I think the sweet spot is in the middle, where somebody, a consultant who can master both, who can use AI to become more efficient and to do research, to gather data, to have better presentation, better reporting, better delivery, but also have this human aspect in the process, the human expertise, the insights, the human layer that’s on top, the human delivery aspect, is where they’re going to be the best ones. In fact, there’s a recent meta-study that came out, and it’s escaping me, but I think it was in conjunction with McKinsey, BCG, and I believe Deloitte, but I might be wrong. But I was told or I’ve found that those that can master both, that use AI in their consultancy, are commanding like 30% more higher fees.

I mean, yeah, to me, it makes sense. And I think this is- so what I want to bring us back to and get your perspective on, there’s going to be people who are joining us right now and thinking, you know, “Yes, I’m going to use AI or I am using AI for research or this or that. But when it comes to content creation, I’m very much opposed to using AI in my content creation. I’m pure and, you know, I want, I want, I only want it to be me.” And I think for the people who have that skillset, if a strength of theirs is writing content, you know, like they’re great at writing, they’re great at whatever the medium is that they’re using, and they want to do that, hats off to them. That’s fantastic. I personally don’t see anything wrong with that if that’s a strength of theirs and they can be consistent with it.

But what I’ve observed, you know, in our work with thousands of consultants is that for a lot of people, content creation is not, you know, kind of, it’s not natural for them or it’s a challenge for them. Or they can do it, but they can’t necessarily do it at the output that they’d like to. And so for them, this is where I see AI as such an amazing opportunity to help you to kind of get past writer’s block, to help you to think about new ideas, to do some of the initial work for you.

But the part that you’re bringing up, which I think is incredibly important, is that if everyone’s just doing, you know, using AI and taking that AI output with very minimal human, you know, intervention or human, you know, perspectives, opinions, all that inside of it, then everything becomes a commodity and then there’s no value in what everybody’s creating. So, that sweet spot, I think what’s incredibly important is that you do bring that human element to it and bring your own knowledge and expertise.

But I want to make this very tangible for people, Michel. So, what is your recommendation? How do you think people should be approaching this? Because if I summarize what I heard from you, it sounds like you could use AI in many different ways in the content creation process. And so, maybe you do initially some research with AI to look at and identify three of the biggest challenges that your marketplace or industry that you serve are having, you get clear on the ideal client, you then develop an outline for an article or a report, and you can then use AI to generate a good chunk of that. But once somebody has that, how can they go forward and feel confident putting their name on the piece of content that they’ve created if AI has done a lot of that work? How would you tell them, “Okay, this is what you should be thinking about, this is how you can use AI effectively to really help you, but still make sure that your expertise is embedded inside of that and that you feel like you can call it your own and feel proud of that work”?

[20:38] – AI as Your Consulting Teammate for Faster Results

Remember last podcast, we talked about one thing that was really important, that we don’t treat AI as a tool. It’s not really a tool. Well, it is, but we shouldn’t treat it as a tool. We should treat it as a teammate. If a lawyer goes to court and wins a case, all the research, the court documents, past precedents, the legal precedents that they have to go through and all that, do you think they did all of that themselves? Of course not. They had paralegals working on it, especially larger legal firms. And if you’re a consultant and you already have a team of, you’ve got researchers, you’ve got some content creators, you’ve got some proof editors, you’ve got some fact checkers. Maybe you have people who can verify your work and come up with different angles or blind spots that you may have missed. That’s where you can use AI as a teammate so that if you do content, you write content, of course, you can use the bare bones where you can do research, come up with different things that you want to write about, whatever. But when you do all that writing, especially, let’s say, you’re working with a client and it’s, and you have not only a report to produce, but you want to make sure that you’re covering all the bases and you also want to make sure that all of your thought processes have been challenged properly so that you can make sure no, there’s no blind spots, there’s no gaps, and AI is there for that reason, too.

And then when you want to elevate your content – you’ve created it, it’s your content, but you want to take it like, let’s say you want to add some visuals, some supporting visuals to prove your point. It is still your content. Maybe you’ve done research. Maybe you’ve done some studies and you actually, some, you’ve got spreadsheets. You’re like a, you’re a spreadsheet person. Well, guess what? You can upload that spreadsheet to an AI and it’ll spit out a nice, beautiful chart and graph because people are visual. Now, you might be a consultant, you might be a data-driven engineer, but the people that you might be serving might be C-suites and business owners, and they’re more visual, bottom-line focus. They don’t care about all the, all the spreadsheets and spreadsheets and stuff. I’m like that, too. But I love data. It’s just that I like to see the data and I’m very visual. Well, guess what? You can use AI in order to augment your humanness. So, again, to just to finalize, so you can have your stuff yourself and use AI to augment, or you can have AI do everything, and then you augment as a human being where you add your spin, you add your insights. So you could be either/or.

That use case that you just brought up right now, I think, is a really great example because there are a lot of people who might consider themselves to be, yeah, more engineer background or science background or somebody’s, you know, more introverted, extroverted, whatever you are. But just that example of somebody who might be very comfortable in the data, right, in the numbers, but not necessarily, or maybe, you know, you’re working in a country where English is the main language used, but maybe English is not your first language, and so you find it, you know, historically harder to create content in English, right? You can use AI to take that data and to say, “Analyze” and ask them, you know, some great questions, use your expertise as a consultant to ask powerful questions that turn that data into an executive summary or turn it into a business case or turn it into maybe even just some bullet points that really summarize the main findings of what the data is showing, and you work that into a presentation or you work that into a piece of content, right? The list goes on and on. But I think that is a really good example and hopefully helpful for people to start thinking about how to do some of these things if you’re not already doing them.

There’s a great course on LinkedIn I took called “Storytelling with Data.” And I loved it because I am not a data nerd, although I can see data, and I can understand it, but if I need to sell it, I need, I need to present it, I need to put it into a report and make sure that there’s buy-in from the client, for example, or a C-suite or a board of directors. Sometimes when you’re dealing with groups of people, you can have very diverse opinions and all that. So you have the ability to use now AI to do that where before I used to do it myself. I used to create my own charts and not, I wanted to do some more, I use a lot of analogies and metaphors so that people can grasp some of what the data is saying. Sometimes you have to do that in order for people to truly understand data, especially if you’re an engineer, you’re not thinking that way. Well, now you have AI at your disposal to do that for you, and that will complement very well and make you more effective because that’s exactly the point I was telling about efficiency and effectiveness.

What’s one use case or way that you are using AI right now, Michel, that you think many others are not using or just don’t realize it’s even possible yet that you believe is beneficial or could really be valuable for a consultant?

I kind of mentioned it earlier. Oftentimes, I thought – and, you know, pardon my language, but I thought I was ‘the shit’. You know, I thought I knew everything. And I think that sometimes you have people who can challenge your thoughts, poke holes. I love that because oftentimes when I do a final presentation, a final delivery, a final piece of content, and somebody comes back and says, “Hey, you missed that.” Like, “Oh my gosh, and I did miss it, you know, and that’s great.” Then I have, you know, different set of eyes on it. Well, guess what? AI is that to me. It does that for me very, and and oftentimes, you can even, you know, direct AI to challenge you, to say, “Don’t just be, you know, agreeable.” Tell, you know, “Go deep, challenge me, be honest, and tell me if there’s anything that I’m missing, any angles that I should be covering, anything that you think that-” and if I give the entire context to the AI, and we do that, for example, in our Consulting Success with our master prompt, which is, we understand exactly what goes on with our ideal client, and some of the challenges and pain points and opportunities that they’re looking for, we can have that AI can look at whatever we’re working on and say, “Hey, you’re missing this,” or “You should be talking about this.” This is where I use it a lot is kind of an analysis tool, not just a research tool, but also to kind of getting and helping me become a better person or a better, a better head of growth.

[27:00] – Building Stronger Business Cases with AI

And so I’ll share one that I’ve been doing here with clients as well in our Clarity Coaching program, and that’s around using AI to develop or strengthen the business case. What I’ve shared with clients quite a bit recently – and this has, you know, been true, I’d say for the last probably six months, maybe even eight months – is that a lot of buyers in the market right now, the majority, I would say, are not interested in spending money or making investments into ‘nice-to-haves’. They’re looking for things that are ‘must-haves’. And a lot of consultants are still kind of stuck in this mindset of a year ago or before, where people were buying ‘nice-to-haves’, right? They were buying features, they were buying deliverables. But today, if buyers can’t clearly see or articulate what the business case is and how they will be better off or how the organization will be better off, they’re certainly not as likely- and what people are experiencing is longer sales cycles, more hesitation, you know, people are kind of ghosting them and not getting back to them. And so by developing a compelling business case that actually shows what the ROI will look like – doesn’t matter, I know somebody might be listening going, “Yeah, but I work in nonprofits, or I don’t work with sales,” or, right, I’m in the more intangible side of value. It’s like, no, no, it doesn’t matter. There’s always a way to identify value and then communicate that and tie it and create a, you know, a compelling business case.

So, what we’ve done is been able to work with our clients to help them by answering a few questions and getting some information about their business and then using AI again with a very well-crafted master prompt that we’ve worked hard on to get to this point, and I did a session, you know, I think it was last week with some clients on this, and people’s minds were blown. They couldn’t believe the output that it was like, “Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s exactly like who my ideal clients are and this is, that is the number one problem that they have. And yeah, I haven’t thought about articulating my value in this way.” And so now they have this business case that they can use in meetings to take people through or in a presentation or elements of it can go into their proposals.

Or another big one that people, a lot of people I don’t think have thought of, is you can use this business case because the business case generally is going to be more compelling than what you’ve been doing before because most people haven’t articulated or haven’t identified or haven’t connected the work that they do to real value or to the value that their buyers care about in today’s marketplace. So, the thing that I also share with people is you need to be taking this business case and now using AI to think about how can you create content that relates back to that business case. So whether it’s articles or whether it’s social posts, like LinkedIn posts, right? All of that can be coming back to the business case, whereas for a lot of people, their social, like their LinkedIn posts or their articles, their newsletters again, is featuring more like ‘nice-to-haves’ or the features or here’s like the work we do, but it’s not necessarily connected to the actual outcome that clients want. So that’s one thing that we’ve been doing, I know, with clients that they’ve really appreciated and found to be helpful. So just, yeah, just another example there.

Well, there’s the benefit, like there’s actually a kind of a nice marriage between what I just talked about, what you just talked about, which is, let’s say you do make a business case, and then you throw it into AI and you say, “Can- analyze this, poke holes, add some, you know, let’s expand this.” And here’s the thing. When I, for example, when I wrote copy, and back in the day when there was no such thing as AI, I had to kind of think about everything that would go into what the benefits would be, not just the primary benefits, but the secondary, the tertiary benefits, the cascading benefits, the knock-on benefits. Oftentimes, like and this is kind of like a positioning process. If you are an operational efficiency consultant, let’s say, and you, you come into an organization and you can find, you know, you can renegotiate contracts, you can find better supply chain vendors, whatever, all those things – and I’m not an efficiency consultant by any stretch of the imagination – but if you are and you can say, “Hey, I can find you thirty million dollars,” that’s right. That’s great. That’s one thing. But what are the secondary and the tertiary benefits? Like, what can finding thirty million dollars do for your company? It can allow you to hire extra staff. It can, it can finally add some more, you know, increase the machinery by adding more software, whatever, you know, whatever. And I’m just saying is that you can do what you just said and then you can even elevate that so that your, the value, your ROI that you provide has much more oomph. And this is where AI can be very, very helpful.

And that’s exactly how I tend to talk with clients or groups when the challenge is posed or the question comes up of, “The work that I do doesn’t impact revenue. I don’t save people money or I don’t make them more money” is the initial kind of, you know, let’s say, a consultant – and we have clients like this – that develop strategic plans, and they work with nonprofit organizations. So they’re doing strategic planning for nonprofit organizations. They say, “Michael, yeah, but it’s very hard for me to articulate ROI because I developed these plans with my clients, but I don’t implement them, and I can’t control whether they raise more funds or not.” And so then, but I say, “Okay, well, that’s great. That’s surface-level thinking. We need to go deeper.” Right? “What if- how likely is it that your, that these clients will achieve their fundraising goals if they do not have a strategic plan?” “Oh, well, yeah, like not, they’re not going to, they’re not going to hit their goals.” “Okay, so like, we can start to think, so now they, let’s say they have a strategic plan. How much more likely do you think they are going to be to, to be successful in this way? If they raise more funds – I know that you can’t control whether they raise more funds or not – but if they raise more funds, what does that mean for them?” “Oh, it means this, it means that.” Right? So it’s, that’s really what you’re talking about.

It’s like going deeper, right? It’s not surface level, it’s going deeper and deeper and deeper. And so, how does all this connect to AI? Because that’s what we’re talking about here today. We’re getting, you know, into, into ROI and and value. But I think it all comes back because if you know what to ask, you can use AI to help you to think through this kind of stuff and to get deeper into even areas of value and then communicate them.

So, Michel, before we wrap up, I wanted to bring up one more thing that’s on my mind, and it’s maybe a little bit philosophical, but I think it’s, to me, it’s very interesting. It’s what I see happening kind of with AI, a little bit about the future. And I saw a report – I can’t remember who it was – it was, you know, some big-name kind of organization that put this out. But the report essentially said that data is starting to show that as people are using AI more to do the, quote-unquote, kind of ‘thinking’ or ‘work’ for them, that their brains are not as active. And probably about four days before I saw this – I think I saw it on X or someplace like that, this report – I’d posted something on LinkedIn saying, “If everyone is doing this kind of, like using AI to do the work for them, does that mean that people will not have the ability?”

And I put it back to my experience of learning Japanese because I started studying Japanese in university. I went to Japan, I had a business there for five or six years, and I remember when I learned kanji, which is essentially the Chinese characters used in the Japanese language, I learned hundreds of those characters, and I did it by like writing it over and over and over and over again, right? Pen and paper and all that kind of stuff. And then when the computers came around, I stopped having to write. Like I would text, you know, send Japanese characters through my phone or through the keyboard, and I have forgotten how to write many of these characters. I can still read them, but if you give me a pen and say, “write it,” I would have a hard time.

And my thinking is, okay, well, how does this then, does this mean something similar is coming for AI where if we’re asking AI to do all the stuff for us, does that mean that we will lose the ability or it’ll be much harder for us to do those things? This report seemed to kind of substantiate or support that, saying there is some danger in that happening. But I don’t know, what’s your take on this?

[35:00] – Will AI Reduce Human Thinking Skills?

Ah.

I mean, how do you view this?

I am very much a person who believes that when we become more – and it comes back to the very thing that we started this entire conversation with – if we become more efficient, it pulls, it takes away all the stuff that- it liberates us to become more effective. You know, I have conversations with my wife sometimes. I use my GPS on my phone, and she’s very much a, you know, “give me a map, I want a physical map,” you know? And sometimes we have conversations about, “Well, if we go to, you know, because she’s Portuguese and we go to Portugal,” she goes, “What happens if your GPS doesn’t work or what happens if the internet goes down?” I get that. But, you know, when they started allowing calculators in exams within math classes, it allowed them to solve more deep, deeper, difficult questions, do more problem solving, more creative problem solving. It allowed the brain to work more in other areas because a lot of the redundant, the repetitive, the, the heavy lifting is done by, like, AI in this case, but like, let’s say calculators or tools or software or computers, that it allows you to become much more effective.

So, you know, I think that these kind of studies, you know, sometimes they’re a little bit biased, and I take them with a bit of a grain of salt. But at the same time, I think it’s true, but I don’t think it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think that once we do find ways to become more, like, if we have all this stuff that’s been taken care of by tools and efficiency, it just makes us better at whatever we’re doing, our core things. And the things that makes us human, creativity, consciousness, reasoning, all those things, expertise, the things that we do as a consultant that we can become much better at as now been, it’s opening up a whole new world that was before taken over by so much in all this redundant stuff that AI is helping us to do.

I don’t know if you can see my screen or not right now.

Yes, I do.

So, this is the post that I put up. It’s bringing it up here. So it was one week ago at this point, right? Because I was in a meeting with a client. They had flown out to Vancouver, and we did a meeting, and that was the day that many of these sites like, you know, Claude and others, that they went down. So we were going to bring something up and do some work, and we couldn’t do it. So it was like, “Okay, well, we can’t do what we were planning to do.” And that kind of got me thinking. So then I thought about Japanese and all that.

But someone in this thread responded and made a really good comparison, which is very apt and kind of connected to what you just talked about. I was trying to find it. They said something like, think about the – oh, yeah, this person, I think it was – mentioned the cash register, right? So imagine back in the day, well, there’s no cash register, right? Everything was done manually. And now look at us today, right? We went from cash registers to POS systems, and now people just tap with their cards, and now people just tap with their phones. Things evolve.

I think that, that to me is like really what I take from what you’re just sharing and it makes sense to me as I think through it. My initial kind of, quote-unquote, you know, I guess my “concern” or it was like, “Well, does that mean like we’re going to stop thinking? Because we won’t need to think anymore?” But I think the point that you’re making that I take well is no, it just means that our thinking will change and our focus will change and we likely won’t need to do some of the things that we are doing today unless we choose to do them. But for many of us, we will maybe out of necessity, still need to or will desire, right, we’ll want to do them because they will be more efficient or more effective, right? The same way as like you could go into a, you could run a store and in that store, you could just take, you know, cash and coins and all that. Or you could show up with one of those Stripe or Square card readers and be able to take more payments because there’s a lot of people that walk the streets these days that don’t carry cash with them. They just have cards or they just have their phone.

So these are the kinds of, I think, adjustments that we’re all going to need to make going forward. And this is why, regardless of kind of what your take is on AI, I believe it is so important, not that you have to become an AI consultant selling AI services. I mean, that’s up to everybody individually based on what their expertise is and what kind of business they want to have, but understanding the implications of AI and what it might mean for you, for your clients, for the future is really what I think excites both of us. And what we’re doing at Consulting Success is to help to, I think, empower our clients so that they also are aware of what’s coming. They don’t need to, you know, no one needs to become an AI consultant unless they want to. There’s lots of areas in the world that need support, and clients and organizations that need support, whether it’s healthcare or manufacturing or design, branding, I mean, you know, science, like you name it, but there’s implications and applications of AI in each of these. And I think that’s really what we’re trying to explore and help people to navigate.

[40:12] – Becoming a Super Consultant with AI

Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, said that –

Huang, yeah.

Yeah, he said that as we see the rise to what he calls “super AI,” it’s going to parallel the rise of the “superhuman.” And it comes back to John Naisbitt, almost to the same, in a different way, but it’s kind of the same idea. And so, I believe that, you know, consultants who can harness AI and use it as a tool to have a lot of these things be more efficient will allow them to become “super consultants.”

Right. Yeah, it’s an interesting concept.

All right, well, we’re going to wrap it up here for today. Michel, thanks so much for coming on. Appreciate it.

I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

All right, everyone, have a great day.

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