AI isn't killing consulting. It's killing time as a proxy for value
It’s killing time as a proxy for valueGenerative AI isn't making expertise less valuable. It's exposing the flaws in pricing knowledge work by time rather than outcomes.Published Thu 16 Jul, 2026 by Mark WilsonEstimated reading time: 5 min“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?”I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one.Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took.
- ▪It’s killing time as a proxy for valueGenerative AI isn't making expertise less valuable.
- ▪It's exposing the flaws in pricing knowledge work by time rather than outcomes.Published Thu 16 Jul, 2026 by Mark WilsonEstimated reading time: 5 min“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?”I’ve heard variations
- ▪On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one.Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,270 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Co |
| Canonical URL | https://www.markwilson.co.uk/thoughts/2026/07/16/ai-isnt-killing-consulting-its-killing-time-as-a-proxy-for-value/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:04:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T22:12:32.707Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T22:12:32.707Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | J4uf6--wEX0P |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI isn’t killing consulting. It’s killing time as a proxy for valueGenerative AI isn't making expertise less valuable. It's exposing the flaws in pricing knowledge work by time rather than outcomes.Published Thu 16 Jul, 2026 by Mark WilsonEstimated reading time: 5 min“Why am I paying a consultant for something AI can do in 15 minutes?”I’ve heard variations of that question several times over the past few months. On the face of it, it’s a perfectly reasonable one.Generative AI can draft documents, analyse data, write code and create presentations in a fraction of the time they once took.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Co.