Imminent Danger
As AI moved from research labs into organisations, the long‑standing imbalance between narrative and engineering reappeared. The people who could speak fluently about AI often gained influence faster than the people who could build or evaluate it. This created a familiar risk: decisions shaped by confidence rather than competence.
The New Hand‑Waving Class
In this environment, a new professional layer emerged: AI Strategists, AI Evangelists, AI Transformation Leads. Their role was not to work with models or data, but to provide narrative certainty in a domain defined by probabilistic behaviour. They became the organisational interpreters of AI — often without the mechanisms of AI in view.
Synthetic Certainty
AI produces clarity when examined closely. Talkers produce certainty when examined superficially. These are not the same thing. When organisations prioritise certainty over clarity, they recreate the same conditions that shaped the software era of the 1970s.
How Organisations Create AI Consultants
The pattern is predictable: pressure to “do AI”, hiring a talker, narrative becomes strategy, builders are asked to deliver the narrative. Potential is lost.
The Risk
If talkers dominate AI, we will get dashboards, maturity models, transformation programmes — everything except working systems.
- AI job titles grew 5–10× faster than deployed AI systems in many enterprises.
- “AI Centres of Excellence” often launched without builders, datasets, or models.
- AI maturity models and transformation frameworks became products in their own right.
- Organisations frequently commissioned AI strategies that contained no technical detail.