> “ clients do not know what they are getting in advance, because they are looking for knowledge that they themselves lack. They cannot measure the results, eit

> “ clients do not know what they are getting in advance, because they are looking for knowledge that they themselves lack. They cannot measure the results, either, because outside factors, such as the quality of execution, influence the outcome of the consultant’s recommendations.” There is a ton of this in cloud computing as well, especially in the AI / ML space. It’s marketed as a production-ready, plug-in solution, on the hopes that the customer isn’t smart enough to evaluate what they are getting. It’s sold as a replacement for an earnest need to understand problems and solutions. Just consider how many cloud vendors charge pay-per-usage for things like pre-built ML models. It makes no sense to pay by usage unless you have a very clear understanding of what accuracy and business impact of failures you’ll get at that usage rate (which depends on your product / customers / data, not primarily on the vendor’s managed model). So either you just trust the vendor and you are flying totally blind in terms of the real accuracy or business value you get per dollar, or you have to go ahead and hire expensive ML experts to maintain that vendor integration and understand its business impact. But in no world can you just buy business value direct from the vendor without someone in the loop actually producing clarified understanding. I think it’s the same with big box consulting. The customer wishes to offload political battles and status turf wars to an outside authority that can just tell them the business value answer without anyone in the loop actually achieving understanding or clarity. It’s pure fool’s gold. The corporate equivalent of obsessively visiting psychics or tarot card readers.