A New Flavor: From Conversations to Insights | Utsav A Bhatt | S1E11

Utsav: Welcome to Alt Consulting Conversations. This series is drawn from my book Alt Consulting. But more importantly, it comes from what I have been seeing unfold in real time. Over the last few years, I have been working closely with organizations trying to adopt artificial intelligence.

And one thing has become very clear. This is not a technology problem. ⁓ It's a behavior change ⁓ It's a system problem. And consulting ⁓ just to be of the first few industries where the shift is becoming visible.

But what's happening here is not limited to consulting. It's a preview of how work itself is going to change. In this series, I'm going to break that down, not as theory and not as hype, but from my lived experience, what's actually working, what's not and what needs to fundamentally change. So let's start with where this began for me.

There moments in your life when nothing around you looks different but inside something has already shifted. This was one of those moments for me. December 2022, Singapore. The rain had just stopped.

The city was quite reflective almost still. I had just wrapped up a completely normal day. Client meetings, frameworks, PowerPoint decks, the kind of work I had been doing for years. And then casually, I opened ChatGPT.

⁓ At first it felt like a tool. You type something, it responds, felt interesting. Then I pushed it a little bit more. And suddenly it wasn't just responding, it was completing my half-baked thoughts, connecting dots, suggesting angles I hadn't yet considered.

And in that moment, I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Not excitement, discomfort. Because you have spent over 15 years in consulting, ⁓ as an engineer, shaped as a strategist, ⁓ develop a very clear sense of how value is created. ⁓ takes time?

What requires effort? ⁓ differentiates from great. ⁓ And suddenly, things that used to take hours, sometimes even days, were happening in ⁓ perfectly ⁓ not reliably at that point of time, ⁓ but enough to make you pause and ask, ⁓ what are we doing here? ⁓ So, I shut my laptop, walked out of the office, took the elevator down and I remember stepping out into the night, smell of wet pavement, ⁓ river reflecting the lights ⁓ thinking ⁓ is not just a new tool, this the beginning of something much bigger, ⁓ this the beginning of the end, ⁓ not consulting ⁓ but of consulting has always been done.

⁓ But that thought stayed with me because if you really break down consulting or should I say traditional consulting, it's built on a very specific model. You have large teams, have structured processes, have layers of analysis, and you have time. Time to research, synthesize, and build towards a great answer. And that model has worked quite successfully and for decades.

But what happens when the foundational work itself starts collapsing? When research becomes faster, when synthesis becomes easier, when the first drafts becomes instant, when the time component the entire business model depends on ⁓ compressing dramatically. ⁓ don't just improve efficiency, you change the economics. ⁓ once the economics change, the cannot remain the same.

⁓ Now is the interesting part. ⁓ At beginning, most people didn't take this seriously. ⁓ Even didn't, ⁓ because earlier versions of AI, as we all know, were not good enough. They made mistakes, they hallucinated, they lacked rigor.

So people tried it and then went back to their old ways, which is exactly how disruption starts. If you have studied disruption, you know this pattern. Something new enters the market. It's weaker, it's dismissed, then it proves slowly, then suddenly, and one day it becomes good enough.

it becomes good enough, everything changes. We are now at that point. Today, many of the tasks that define consulting, especially at junior and middle levels, like research, benchmarking, synthesis, first drafts of thinking, can be done in minutes. Not perfectly, but fast enough and good enough to fundamentally change how work gets done.

And this creates a very uncomfortable reality. Because if you're honest, A significant part of consulting value was tied to the effort, to the time it took, to the team it required, to the process it followed. But when effort reduces, you are forced to answer a much harder question. Where is the real value?

Is it the analysis? Is it the judgment? Is it the slides? Or is it in the decisions those slides enable?

And this is where things starts to shift. Because the moment you separate effort from value, you realize something important. A lot what we thought was "value" ⁓ actually just a "process." ⁓ once that realization hits, ⁓ can't unsee it.

⁓ is where alt begins. ⁓ Not an idea or a framework, ⁓ but a question. ⁓ If the old model no longer makes sense, what does the new one look like? Do you still need large teams of consultants?

Do you still need long timelines? Do you still need high costs to deliver high quality outcomes? Or is there a different way to do this? A leaner way, a faster way, a more outcome focused way.

And over time, through my own work, through experiments, and more importantly, through conversations with clients, a pattern started to emerge. The best work not coming from big teams, it was coming from sharp thinking. ⁓ tighter loops, faster iteration, focusing ⁓ effort only where it matters. ⁓ that's what alt consulting represents.

⁓ not about replacing consulting, it's about redesigning ⁓ Now if you're a consultant, this raises uncomfortable questions. What is your role now? What is your edge? When tools can do what used to define your early career?

What happens to the pyramid when the base of the pyramid starts disappearing? And if you're a client, the question is even more direct. Why pay for the old model when the new model can deliver faster at a fraction of the cost with equal or better outcomes? And this is not a theoretical question anymore.

This is already happening. Quietly but steadily. ⁓ So this book and this podcast ⁓ my attempt to make sense of shift ⁓ not from the outside ⁓ but from inside the system ⁓ then stepping back and realizing ⁓ the system itself is changing. ⁓ In this series, I'm going to break this down, how consulting is being disrupted, why traditional models are becoming less relevant, what new models are emerging, how clients should think about this shift and what this means for the future of consultants.

But more importantly, this is not just about consulting. This is about a broader shift in how knowledge work gets done. And consulting happens to be one of the first industries where the shift is becoming visible. Because what I felt that night standing by the river was not just curiosity, it was clarity.

Clarity that something fundamental had changed. And that we were at the very beginning of a transition that most people still don't fully see. And the real question is not whether consulting will change. It is whether we are willing to change with it.

Because at its core, this is not just a story about consulting. It's a story about how work is being rewritten. Yes, we will talk about how AI is changing consulting, how the models are evolving, what new approaches are emerging, and what this means for consultants and clients. But we are also going to go beyond that.

⁓ We will ⁓ look at how adoption is happening across ⁓ whether it's working, whether it's failing, and most importantly, what it really takes to make it work. ⁓ the hardest part is not building the technology, it's redesigning how people work with it. ⁓ And the thread that connects everything in this ⁓ not AI as a tool, but AI as a trigger to rethink work itself. Because the future will not be defined by who has access to AI, it will be defined by who knows how to work with it.