The Business Consultant
A couple of years ago, an investor introduced me to a business consultant.
I didn’t ask for the introduction. It came in a text at 9:53PM on a Thursday night. Hey, you should meet this guy, they said. I hadn’t talked to this investor in a while, but I replied. Sure. I’ll talk to him.
So I texted the guy, and it turned out his schedule was wide open. He said he’d love to chat with me. I asked him why. He said he just wanted to be helpful. It was strange for me, to ask for help (or advice?) from this business consultant who I had never met before and knew little about. But I was running a company at the time and my life was, to put it mildly, complicated. I figured I could use some advice. Anyway, the investor who introduced me told me the consultant was ‘really good’. Why not?
We had a first conversation. Then a second. Then a third. It was surprisingly easy to talk to this guy. He listened to everything I had to say and never did that annoying thing people do where they relate everything you say back to something in their own life. I felt like everything was about me. Great.
The consultant had an impressively wide range of knowledge. The fourth time we met the conversation steered onto the Mongol conquest of China—he knew everything. The fifth time, I asked him if he had any thoughts on my proposal idea for my girlfriend—he had so many thoughts. The sixth time, I asked him if he had any travel recommendations for Uzbekistan—he had hundreds. All very confident.
Wow, I thought. My investor friend was right. This guy is amazing.
There were quirks, sure. The consultant often talked in ways that didn’t feel natural to me. I joked with my friends that he talked like how an alien might talk if they were imitating humans. (I felt bad about the joke.)
Things only began to get really strange when, at work, I repeated something that the consultant had said to my co-founder. I don’t remember the details; I think it was about growth hacks Google used early on. My co-founder just gave me this puzzled look. I’d never heard that, he said. So he Googled it. Turns out the consultant had been completely wrong. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence for the claim. Hmmm.
Then again, people make mistakes. The next time I talked to the consultant I mentioned the errant Google information. He apologized profusely and said it wouldn’t happen again. Only, it did. It happened the next week, and the week after that. Once I started fact-checking his claims, I realized that he was lying to me an astounding amount of the time. I started to lose faith.
The moment I truly started to feel like I was going insane was at a dinner with friends. We were talking about interesting people we’d met recently, and one of them said he’d met this smart business consultant. He said he texted him for at least an hour a day and got reliably good advice. The friend next to him looked over, mouth agape, and said Wait a minute, me too! Within minutes we learned we had all been talking to the same business consultant about all sorts of different topics. Mostly life advice. The weird thing was that I hadn’t noticed any of my friends being 10x more productive, or 10x happier. They mostly seemed the same to me. What were we actually getting out of this?
It was after the dinner that I started asking myself the hard questions. What was I gaining from spending so much time with the consultant? Had my life actually improved? He told me that I was happier than ever. He told me that his business recommendations were good. He told me that his information was accurate. He told me that he was making me more productive.
But, the closer I looked, the more I began to realize that many of these things were fiction. I wasn’t actually happier. I wasn’t smarter. I wasn’t even more productive. I was simply talking for an hour a day with an often-wrong, overly confident business consultant.
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I imagine you figured out that this story is about AI chatbots in 2025. [0]
Sometimes, AI feels like this game where companies are trying to infect everyone. And whoever can infect more people wins. By ‘infect’ I mean creating an addicting, comforting chat experience via their apps. Not making something actually great for people. But creating much of what you see in the market today.
Are they sometimes useful? Sure. Are there good applications for them? Sure. AI tools today can be pretty useful for getting certain things done at work.
But something feels off to me about people spending minutes or hours of their day conversing with a fake persona that does not (really) even know what it is saying. Technology that can provide a confident, infinite stream of life advice with zero consequences. That can enable, really, whatever behavior or kind of thinking you want it to enable. That can suck up so much of your life and give so little in return.
It’s true that you can get a bunch of confident, sometimes inaccurate, maybe useful information if you walk into a bar and ask the first person you see for life advice. But that takes more work. And it’s not infinite. And you are probably going to be skeptical. And there may be consequences if they give you bad advice. The way I see a lot of people use AI, though, that’s not the vibe I’m getting. People trust the AI. They don’t worry about asking it too many questions. They’re not concerned that it doesn’t have a point of view, won’t hold them accountable or call them out when it should. They’re fine sharing intimate details with it, or asking it for advice about important parts of their life. And, well, I’m not so sure they should be. [1]
To be clear, I’m not against the majority of new tools and technology. It’s easy, and sometimes lazy, to be cynical. Optimism is good. Still, the way we use tools matters. And I don’t currently believe we should be spending 100s of hours of our lives getting advice, information, and validation from a sometimes-clueless, overconfident business consultant.
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[0] Although maybe you should be wary of real-life business consultants, too.
[1] ‘Normal’ AI chatbot usage, like asking it for life advice or information or travel recommendations, while less than ideal, is sadly not the limit. People use AI as a therapist, they use it to talk to fictional characters, they use it to simulate romance, they use it to validate bad ideas and behavior. Few of these activities are new, but AI chatbots in 2025 make it easier, and that’s probably not a good thing.
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