The AI Consulting Paradox

Summary

Paul Ford and Rich Ziade open with a field report from a visit by a New School journalism class that came through the Aboard offices: roughly fourteen students, ages 19-21, who treat AI not as a revolution but as a utility “over in the corner.” Several said outright that they don’t want to use it too much in school because they’re “supposed to be learning how to think.” Paul reads this as a healthy break from the social-media playbook — AI doesn’t pull on people the way Facebook or Twitter do, because the endpoints aren’t other humans. Rich agrees and goes a step further: “AI gets boring.” Wikipedia is weird because it’s an artifact of humans negotiating; LLM output is just digested.

The bulk of the episode then dissects an article from The Guardian in which PwC US CEO Paul Griggs warns his 365,000 employees, in roughly so many words, that anyone who isn’t “AI first” or “paranoid” about the technology won’t be at the firm long. The hosts use this to frame what they call the “AI consulting paradox”: at the individual-contributor level, the message is simple — use the tools, you’ll be more productive. But at the partner level, where someone is bringing in $15 million a year billing PwC people against legacy ERP integrations, PDF mills, and offshore teams, AI is essentially a tool to take that $15 million figure down to $5 million. So managers and partners drag their feet, dress up legacy work in AI clothing, and signal compliance without actually cannibalizing themselves — much as Netflix had to do during its rough transition from mail-in DVDs to streaming.

In the back half, Paul and Rich design what a “consulting firm for the new era” should look like: strategy-heavy at the front, where AI is genuinely bad (it can’t sit in a boardroom and interview your users), and AI-native on the back end where execution is now nearly free. Big Four firms have to compete with Accenture certifying 30,000 people on Claude Code and with private equity buyers who don’t care about Stan’s twenty-year contract — they bought you to make you efficient. The episode closes on the human reality of professional services: spouses come out for dinner together, partners have earned trust over twenty years, and that “rainbow-colored tornado” of AI transformation will reach those steakhouse relationships, but it’ll take time.

Highlights

”An employee who thinks they have the opportunity to opt out of AI is not going to be here that long”

“Senior staff who are not paranoid about being AI first… would probably be replaced by others who were ready to embrace the technology. I don’t think anyone gets a free pass here, anyone, Griggs told the Financial Times. And an employee who thinks they have the opportunity to opt out of AI is not going to be here that long, Griggs added.” — Paul Ford, 11:23

yt-dlp --download-sections "*11:23-12:20" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-11m23s.mp4"

”I’m waiting for my bonus and it’s in September”

“I’m a filthy human being, I would drag my feet. I’ve got a timeshare in Aruba that I’m got my eye on… I’m going to drag my damn feet. And yes, I’ve got 50 people who do this amazing thing where it checks the fields in the PDF and then it combines a dozen of them into one mega PDF and they’re really good at it.” — Rich Ziade, 18:42

yt-dlp --download-sections "*18:42-19:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-18m42s.mp4"

”Wikipedia is weird because it’s an artifact of humans negotiating”

“Wikipedia is weird because it’s an artifact of humans negotiating. You’ll read this one paragraph and you’ll be like, ‘Oh, what happened here?’ You go into the talk page and you’re like, ‘Oh, no.’” — Rich Ziade, 8:03

yt-dlp --download-sections "*8:03-8:55" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-8m03s.mp4"

”Rather than running from the tornado, I’m a tornado chaser”

“Benioff said, you know what? Rather than running from the tornado, I’m a tornado chaser. I’m going to go into it and I’m going to be one. He said I may rename Salesforce to Agentforce… Don’t tell me it’s an either-or. I am the future. And I’m also 40% more expensive. But don’t worry about that.” — Paul Ford, 23:58

yt-dlp --download-sections "*23:58-24:55" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-23m58s.mp4"

”Strategic dialogue is going to get more expensive”

“AI can’t hang out and interview your users, understand your processes… that expertise of talking to the right people, what’s your five-year goal — that is management consulting of the highest order. That interaction is going to get more expensive. Because the execution side of that strategy is going to get really cheap.” — Rich Ziade, 27:42

yt-dlp --download-sections "*27:42-28:45" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-27m42s.mp4"

”Stan has been doing this for 15 years and you show up and you are the Grim Reaper”

“Everybody wants the new thing, but they never want to tell Stan no. He’s been doing this for 15 years and you show up and you are the Grim Reaper.” — Rich Ziade, 31:04

yt-dlp --download-sections "*30:57-31:50" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RohbF2_GZE0" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "RohbF2_GZE0-30m57s.mp4"

Key Points

• The New School journalism class visit (1:09) — ~14 students aged 19-21 came through Aboard offices to discuss AI and journalism
• Self-regulation among students (3:00) — “I won’t grow my skills if I just rely on this thing” — conscious limits on AI use during school
• AI inherits the social-media narrative (6:20) — A lot of how we talk about AI comes from the debacle of social media, but AI doesn’t pull users in the same way
• AI gets boring (7:45) — Rich’s claim that LLM output lacks the friction and weirdness of human-made artifacts like Wikipedia
• PwC CEO Paul Griggs’ ultimatum (11:23) — Senior staff who aren’t “paranoid” about being AI first should expect to be replaced
• PwC remains a net acquirer (12:00) — Consulting grew 5.5% last year despite AI; firm has 365,000 employees
• PwC One launching (12:30) — Automated services platform that lets clients access PwC tax and consulting tools without a person in the loop
• Threatening CEO vs. inspiring CEO (14:46) — Griggs picked threats over watchwords; signaling to the market as much as to staff
• Accenture certifying 30,000 on Claude Code (15:17) — Competitive pressure from peers driving the AI-first messaging
• The cannibalization math (18:07) — A partner with $15M/year in legacy billings honestly delivering AI value would crash to $5M
• Partners will drag their feet (18:33) — Bonus is in September; the timeshare in Aruba is on the line; legacy revenue resists transformation
• Netflix’s DVD-to-streaming analogy (19:29) — Reed Hastings called the shift early, before streaming was good; “I want off” of the prior business
• Salesforce’s Agentforce pivot (23:14) — Benioff considered renaming Salesforce to Agentforce; “I am the future, and I’m also 40% more expensive”
• Strategy gets more expensive, execution gets cheap (27:42) — AI can’t interview users or set five-year goals; the human strategy work commands a premium
• Data lakes get easier with vibe coding (29:06) — Centralizing all of an org’s data is now far cheaper, opening up genuine platform architecture
• Private equity is excited (32:37) — PE firms buy inefficient organizations to make them efficient; political resistance evaporates when the owner says go
• The Stan problem (31:04) — Companies say they want transformation, then introduce you to “Stan who’s been doing this for 15 years”
• Steakhouse relationships persist (33:00) — 20-year client/partner friendships, spouses-at-dinner trust — the slowest part of the transition

Mentions

Companies & Organizations

• PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) (9:00) — Big Four accounting and consulting firm; subject of the episode; 365,000 employees; rooted in auditing
• The New School (1:09) — New York City liberal arts college; journalism program visited Aboard
• Parsons (1:28) — The New School’s design school partner
• Deloitte (10:36) — Big Four peer of PwC
• Accenture (15:17) — Certifying 30,000 employees on Claude Code
• McKinsey (16:41) — Strategy-first consulting firm; partners typically bring $10M/year
• Salesforce / Agentforce (23:14) — Benioff considered the rename; positioned as offensive AI play
• Netflix (19:29) — Reed Hastings’ DVD-to-streaming pivot used as transition analogy
• Blockbuster (19:53) — Obliterated by Netflix’s first wave
• SAP (10:43) — ERP platform PwC implements at enterprise scale
• The Guardian (8:51) — Source of the article quoting Paul Griggs
• Financial Times (11:23) — Where Griggs originally made his “no free pass” remarks
• Aboard (33:46) — Paul and Rich’s company; AI-native software firm

Products & Technologies

• PwC One (12:30) — Forthcoming AI platform offering automated services to clients
• Claude Code (15:17) — Anthropic’s coding agent that Accenture is certifying 30,000 employees on
• Wikipedia (7:56) — Held up as the example of “weird” content — artifact of human negotiation
• Data lake (28:55) — Architectural pattern that becomes more attainable with vibe coding
• COBOL (30:30) — Legacy language whose persistence illustrates “it works, my numbers look great”

People

• Paul Griggs (11:08) — US CEO of PwC; author of the AI-first ultimatum
• Reed Hastings (20:05) — Netflix CEO who steered the streaming transition before streaming was good
• Marc Benioff (23:38) — Salesforce CEO; “tornado chaser” framing; named his company after sales

Themes & Concepts

• The “AI consulting paradox” — Selling AI to clients undermines the billable-labor model that funds the consulting business
• Net acquirer — A firm that’s still hiring more than it loses, despite AI displacement
• Tornado chaser — Benioff’s framing for embracing rather than fighting an existential disruption
• Strategy-heavy front-end / commodity execution back-end — The proposed shape of the consulting firm of the future

Surprising Quotes

“I think they’re trying to — and the schools are paralyzed. School policy and what your professor tells you is kind of meaningless because they know that tool’s in your pocket. That ship has sailed.” — Rich Ziade, 3:51

“Everybody talks about the environmental costs, but they’re not as bad as taking a 40-minute shower.” — Paul Ford, paraphrasing a New School student, 5:12

“The CEO can kind of do two things. They can either say three inspiring words that will become the watchwords for the next five years until they get fired two years from now, or they can threaten you. And this is a threatening CEO.” — Rich Ziade, 14:46

“We are unencumbered by a past. That is a huge, huge advantage.” — Rich Ziade, 22:27

“It’s a rainbow-colored tornado that is spinning at everything. So some things will move more quickly than others, but it’ll take time.” — Rich Ziade, 33:27

Transcript

Paul Ford: 0:00 Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: 0:02 And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul Ford: 0:03 This is the Aboard Podcast, the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software development. Richard, how are you?

Rich Ziade: 0:08 I’m doing well, how are you?

Paul Ford: 0:09 I’m good. Let’s talk about the subject of this podcast in just a second and I want to tell you about some nice college students I met.

Rich Ziade: 0:17 Okay.

Paul Ford: 0:18 All right. Let’s play the theme song.

Paul Ford: 0:36 How you doing?

Rich Ziade: 0:37 I’m doing good.

Paul Ford: 0:38 How’s family?

Rich Ziade: 0:39 Everyone’s great. For the play, Matilda is being sung in my house constantly.

Paul Ford: 0:44 It’s a lot. The singing girl is a lot.

Rich Ziade: 0:48 But performances are today and tomorrow and then it’s over.

Paul Ford: 0:52 It’s never over. There’s always another performance.

Rich Ziade: 0:55 Okay.

Paul Ford: 0:56 Yeah, but that’s okay. My daughter went for ballet, which I gotta say, it’s New York, so you end up going to this enormous auditorium where it’s a really good Nutcracker. You end up really enjoying yourself. Okay, so that’s not what this is about. We had some lovely college students come in. It was a class from The New School in the journalism program.

Rich Ziade: 1:19 The New School is a school here in New York City.

Paul Ford: 1:21 That’s right. It’s sort of the alternative college. Art and design is its focus.

Rich Ziade: 1:28 No, no. It’s liberal arts, all sorts of stuff. It’s big. You’re thinking about Parsons, which it’s partnered with.

Paul Ford: 1:34 That’s right. It’s a classic New York institution at this point. About 14 students came by and they want to learn about AI. They’re learning about technology and how it interacts with journalism. And I didn’t know what we were going to get — it could be like, “I hate you guys for existing.” It could be like, “Help me save my journalism career.” Age range?

Rich Ziade: 2:07 Oh, like 19 to 21.

Paul Ford: 2:09 Okay. And they look like babies to me now.

Rich Ziade: 2:11 Well, you’re an old man.

Paul Ford: 2:13 I have 14-year-olds at home, so I’m just like, oh, you’re my children plus four.

Rich Ziade: 2:17 You’re old.

Paul Ford: 2:18 Middle-aged. We move fast in the world of software. But we’re old also in the world of software. You were in the room for a minute, and they were very — this is funny because we’re kind of gray and they’re very colorful. They all have dyed hair and one guy was wearing a red coat.

Rich Ziade: 2:40 Yeah, a red trench coat is utterly fine.

Paul Ford: 2:42 It was like going to an aviary. Everything was just very shiny. They’re super smart and super nice. They had tons of questions, but what was really interesting was when you asked them about AI. One person was like, “Hey, look, I use it at my job.” We didn’t go into that, but she was like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to use it too much when I’m in school because I’m supposed to be learning how to think and do things with my brain.”

Rich Ziade: 3:00 The hesitation, I was there for that question around, I won’t grow. I won’t grow my skills and my capabilities and my mind won’t expand if I just rely on this thing. For young people to be consciously aware of that. This is an extremely small sample size.

Paul Ford: 3:21 It’s a small sampling.

Rich Ziade: 3:22 But it was a diverse group of human beings.

Paul Ford: 3:24 Diverse group of human beings. The sentiment of “Hey, I still want to be a fully formed person with interesting capabilities.” You know what I realized? It’s always been there for them through their undergrad experience. We’re thinking of this as a new thing in the world, and they’re just like, “Yeah, this is part of college. People just use AI to write their papers.”

Rich Ziade: 3:51 Yeah, it is. It’s normal and the schools are paralyzed. School policy and what your professor tells you is kind of meaningless because they know that tool’s in your pocket, they know it’s on your laptop. That ship has sailed. So policy around how you should or shouldn’t use it is kind of out the window. What’s interesting is the self-regulating aspect of it. How do you become awesome at anything and make people’s eyebrows raise if you’re all dipping into the same well of knowledge?

Paul Ford: 4:52 This is very anecdotal, but if you look at how people talk about AI in the world, it is either, “This is the most evil thing and it has paralyzed our children. They cannot think.”

Rich Ziade: 5:08 It’s a lot of dramatic headlines, right?

Paul Ford: 5:12 Or it’s the absolute future of everything. Instead, what I saw were a lot of city kids, maybe not from the city but they’re now of the city, and they’re just like, “Man, I don’t know. It is what it is.” One student used it a lot for vibe coding. They were doing that. And they were like, “You know, everybody talks about the environmental costs, but they’re not as bad as taking a 40-minute shower.”

Rich Ziade: 5:43 Who takes a 40-minute shower? Oh my god. Do people do that?

Paul Ford: 5:47 Teen girls, dude. It is a challenge in the household.

Rich Ziade: 5:51 I’m out in like five.

Paul Ford: 5:52 Yeah, I know. You usually get it down to like one.

Rich Ziade: 5:54 Five.

Paul Ford: 5:57 So anyway, the grappling with the ethical use of it. But I like the self-interest here. They’re like, “Wait a minute, if I just do this then I’m not interesting at all. I won’t have anything interesting to say. I won’t be reading interesting things.” We talked in the past about how people are using it like to firehose applications for jobs.

Rich Ziade: 6:00 Yeah. And then on the other end, the recruiter at the company is using AI to filter through the firehose of stuff that came in. That’s gonna die fast. How do you stand out? How do you connect? I’m glad they’re wary of it. You’re not going to compete unless — in a competitive sphere, how do I stand out, right?

Paul Ford: 6:20 I just saw a room of people who were well put together. A lot of people were wearing makeup, their clothes were nicely chosen, their hair was groomed, and they were just like, “this may or may not be for me.” And I was like, “Okay, you seem to be — there’s obviously a way to be healthy with this.” It made me think that a lot of our narratives, a lot of how we talk about AI, is inherited from the debacle of social media. Especially with the haters: “Look what Facebook did. Look what Twitter has done. And now we have more of this, but it’s worse. It’s pretending to be a human being.” I didn’t get that sense from them. The sense I got was, this is a utility over in the corner. They don’t feel cut off from the world by not using it, whereas social media, that’s a lot harder.

Rich Ziade: 7:22 Yeah, the gravitational pull of social media is much harder. We saw it over the last 10, 15 years. The endpoints are other people that you want to connect with and see and you want them to see you. That’s harder and frankly probably more damaging. AI gets boring.

Paul Ford: 7:44 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 7:45 That’s the thing and the young people like to be tickled. Punk rock landed for a reason. And it’s so boring. It’s great to find out something about a piece of history, but boy is it boring.

Paul Ford: 7:56 It’s true. It can be quirky or surprising, but it’s not weird. You know what’s weird? Wikipedia is weird.

Rich Ziade: 8:03 Wikipedia is weird because it’s an artifact of humans negotiating. You’ll read this one paragraph and you’ll be like, “Oh, what happened here?” You go into the talk page and you’re like, “Oh, no.”

Paul Ford: 8:14 Yeah. You don’t have the artifacts of human contention when you get that LLM output. It’s just kind of digested.

Rich Ziade: 8:22 And we’re not taking the grumpy old men position here. AI is going to definitely change the world. That’s going to happen.

Paul Ford: 8:29 Well, neither were they, right? They know it’s going to be in their lives forever. It’s utility. They know they’ll probably have to use it at work, but they’re like, “I will be a more interesting person if I go ahead and read a book.” So God bless. I thought that was just positive to see.

Rich Ziade: 8:44 It was positive to see.

Paul Ford: 8:46 I just wanted to share. Now I want to share with you an article.

Rich Ziade: 8:49 Uh-oh. More positivity, Paul?

Paul Ford: 8:51 Just a little — an alternative viewpoint. Software’s changing in this new world. It’s from The Guardian, which I subscribe — I have the app. PWC, what is PWC?

Rich Ziade: 9:02 PricewaterhouseCoopers is one of the big giant consultancies.

Paul Ford: 9:09 Hundreds of thousands of employees.

Rich Ziade: 9:10 Hundreds of thousands of employees. Its roots are in auditing and accounting.

Paul Ford: 9:15 Let’s give people an explainer. We’re going to talk about their CEO coming down hard like we all got to use AI. But what is auditing and accounting — you go public, you’re a giant company?

Rich Ziade: 9:24 You need independent auditing.

Paul Ford: 9:26 Why do you need that?

Rich Ziade: 9:27 Because there is an assumption, especially if you have regulatory requirements on reporting, there is an assumption that humans fudge things. So you need an independent audit. It’s not just for reporting your numbers to governments, it’s also when somebody’s acquiring you and you need an independent audit of your books. Are you filing for bankruptcy? It’s a million reasons.

Paul Ford: 9:58 And the way that you regulate and manage a company increasingly is not just by looking at a bunch of pieces of paper, but software.

Rich Ziade: 10:07 Yes.

Paul Ford: 10:08 Yeah. So PWC ends up being one of the biggest implementers of giant software platforms.

Rich Ziade: 10:13 Yes. I see it a little differently, which is these organizations branch out because the lines to the decision makers are already in place. Then you say, “Well, I guess we’ve now got an IT offering.” It’s common amongst big consulting that they branch out because they’re already in the room.

Paul Ford: 10:36 PWC — you’re going to go public, you might talk to PWC. You’re going to talk to Deloitte, you might talk to a few firms.

Rich Ziade: 10:43 You’re going to implement SAP’s new version for logistics across your 300,000 employees —

Paul Ford: 10:47 You also might talk to PWC.

Rich Ziade: 10:48 Exactly. So this is a very, very big company that touches the largest companies at a very low level. It’s very global — accounting, finance, and all the deep ugly software.

Paul Ford: 11:04 A lot of maintaining of old software.

Rich Ziade: 11:06 That’s right. It’s one of their things.

Paul Ford: 11:08 So they’re very big. We’ve talked to them, they’re very nice. The CEO in the US, whose name is Paul Griggs, said the following.

Paul Ford: 11:23 “Senior staff who are not paranoid about being AI first — which amusing, I don’t know how you’re going to measure that paranoia — would probably be replaced by others who were ready to embrace the technology. I don’t think anyone gets a free pass here, anyone, Griggs told the Financial Times. And an employee who thinks they have the opportunity to opt out of AI is not going to be here that long, Griggs added.”

Paul Ford: 11:50 I’ll give you just a few more facts and I think we should talk about if you’re that employee what you should do. Griggs said that PWC’s employment strategy had changed as AI altered —

Rich Ziade: 12:00 Working practices, but the firm remained a net acquirer. So they’re still growing. Consulting grew 5.5% last year.

Paul Ford: 12:06 Okay.

Rich Ziade: 12:07 Because of all this AI transformation.

Paul Ford: 12:09 Sure. Ironically, it’s supposed to be killing them.

Rich Ziade: 12:11 Yeah. Early evidence that maybe the balance isn’t towards total labor destruction. We’ll see. They’re hiring more data specialists, they have 365,000 employees. They’re going to change some tax and consulting services into AI-powered automated tools, accessed —

Paul Ford: 12:30 Without a PwC person in the loop. The last bit is they’re going to launch an AI platform that offers automated services for clients called PwC One. Now let’s be clear. This is all exhausting. Just hearing about it I start to die inside. Except they manage trillions of dollars in the world economy. Like boats moving across the ocean kind of stuff. So what you’re hearing is — look, we don’t have a real regulatory framework around AI, we don’t have a real national or global strategy. We’ve dropped these technologies in the world. The college students are figuring it out in their way, but PwC issuing this — they’re kind of the last to move. They’ll have a lot of big initiatives, but they’re not going to move fast ever because they can’t. If they do, that’s too much risk into the system.

Rich Ziade: 13:25 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 13:26 So what do you think is going on here? What if you were working at PwC? What should you do?

Rich Ziade: 13:31 I want to make a distinction between someone that is responsible for outputting work or responsible for other people to output work. If you’re responsible for outputting work —

Paul Ford: 13:46 An individual contributor.

Rich Ziade: 13:48 Thank you. You shouldn’t wait for the CEO to tell you to use these tools. You should use these tools. You’ll be more productive, you’ll undo ugly knots more quickly. And that time you’ve reclaimed doesn’t mean you get to take a walk in the park. It means you get to showcase other value to the organization because you’re a smarty who likes new tools.

Paul Ford: 14:14 You know what? Let ‘em take a freaking walk in the park. We always do this. You can take a walk in the park.

Rich Ziade: 14:20 Oh, here we go.

Paul Ford: 14:21 The people who work here take walks in the park. And they work hard.

Rich Ziade: 14:26 True. You can take a walk in the park, Paul. Fine.

Paul Ford: 14:30 We come down as like, “ah, you gotta just keep working.”

Rich Ziade: 14:34 Get back to work.

Paul Ford: 14:35 We’re not that as leaders.

Rich Ziade: 14:37 Yeah, okay, fine.

Paul Ford: 14:40 That person — it’s coded in the CEO’s message, which is kind of a salad of recommendations.

Rich Ziade: 14:46 God forbid anyone ever say anything like, “Hey, here’s the three things I really need you to do to succeed.” Let’s actually talk about that for a sec because the CEO can kind of do two things. They can either say three inspiring words that will become the watchwords for the next five years until they get fired two years from now, or they can threaten you. And this is a threatening CEO.

Paul Ford: 15:02 I think he’s also signaling to the world that PWC is now AI first, modern.

Rich Ziade: 15:10 We’re on it, we’re on it.

Paul Ford: 15:12 So he’s essentially saying, if you’re an IC, if you’re an individual contributor, use the tools. We expect you to.

Rich Ziade: 15:17 Well, I think he’s also reacting to the fact that Accenture is getting 30,000 people certified on Claude Code. All the people in the neighborhood are leaning in in their own way.

Paul Ford: 15:29 You gotta use these tools.

Rich Ziade: 15:32 And you have to show, if you’re the giant company, that you’re on it.

Paul Ford: 15:35 Yes. Here’s the other persona, much trickier.

Rich Ziade: 15:43 The manager.

Paul Ford: 15:45 The manager, and let’s be real — the IC, you should have a Claude subscription or whatever they let you use at PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is probably called like Price AI Cooper.

Rich Ziade: 15:54 We said PWC One.

Paul Ford: 15:57 Yeah, that’s bad. God, what a terrible name.

Rich Ziade: 16:00 It’s accountants.

Paul Ford: 16:02 They don’t know what to do. What’s the next version gonna be called? Two?

Rich Ziade: 16:08 They could’ve gone for Alpha, too. They could’ve done at least something.

Paul Ford: 16:11 Anyway, they’re accountants. The managers and the managers’ managers and the ones that have literally human infrastructure in these organizations —

Rich Ziade: 16:28 Which they’re referring to partners a lot here too. Partners have to get on board. So those are managers.

Paul Ford: 16:33 What does a partner mean? Somebody who brings revenue into the organization.

Rich Ziade: 16:39 Often does.

Paul Ford: 16:41 For people who don’t know, when you hear “they’re a McKinsey partner,” that means they bring $10 million a year in services. And if they don’t bring $10 million a year in, they’re probably not a partner.

Rich Ziade: 16:52 Yes. So let’s say the quiet part out loud. There are partners who will bring millions of dollars in, and if they impose AI too quickly to their relationships, it calls into question the revenue they bring in. That is an absolute fact.

Paul Ford: 17:12 This is a funny puzzle. AI is a really great cost-savings mechanism, right?

Rich Ziade: 17:22 It is a great “what you thought was relevant is now irrelevant” mechanism.

Paul Ford: 17:27 So you have $10, $15 million in billings from these like I don’t know paper companies…

Rich Ziade: 17:34 A PDF vetting and generation off of spreadsheets.

Paul Ford: 17:39 Oh yeah, and a big ERP integration. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means. There are 70 people offshore who do that.

Rich Ziade: 17:47 Oh, and we’re translating a legacy codebase to a new codebase, all these things.

Paul Ford: 17:51 If you let you and me in, we’ll tell you that can all get done in three weeks. We’re dangerous that way.

Rich Ziade: 17:57 We are. I’m not saying we’re amazing. What I’m saying is we don’t have that to lose.

Paul Ford: 18:01 We don’t have the legacy revenue to lose. So I’m bringing in $15 million a year by billing up PWC people and charging licensing. And now the boss just said, okay, drive this value out to your customers. But if I do that, I can’t justify more than $5 million a year for everything I do.

Rich Ziade: 18:27 Oh, oh, yes. You go from 15 to 5.

Paul Ford: 18:29 What the hell do I do now?

Rich Ziade: 18:30 This is…

Paul Ford: 18:33 So I’m going to drag my feet first of all. Every human being and we’re seeing this everywhere. They’re going to drag their feet.

Rich Ziade: 18:42 I’m a filthy human being, I would drag my feet. I’ve got a timeshare in Aruba that I’m got my eye on. I haven’t bought it yet.

Paul Ford: 18:48 And I’m waiting for my bonus and it’s in September.

Rich Ziade: 18:51 That’s right. I’m going to drag my damn feet. And yes, I’ve got 50 people who do this amazing thing where it checks the fields in the PDF and then it combines a dozen of them into one mega PDF and they’re really good at it.

Paul Ford: 19:00 But wait Rich, the CEO said we have to be really smart about AI.

Rich Ziade: 19:03 Fine. I’ll take it on as: Guess what? You want to pick a color theme for your PDF or whatever?

Paul Ford: 19:10 Everybody kind of knows this pattern. The CEO says it and the people are like “Absolutely boss!” and then they do a little dance, they sell some AI work on top of stuff and they definitely try to keep the number from going down. How would you know if a CEO was actually serious about wanting to do this kind of transformation?

Rich Ziade: 19:26 He’s not.

Paul Ford: 19:27 But what would be the signal?

Rich Ziade: 19:29 Because everything you said about what he said is not about transformational change. I wrote about this two weeks ago. I don’t know what the chart looked like when Netflix transitioned from mail-in DVDs to streaming. I’m going to guess it’s like a post-operative trauma.

Paul Ford: 19:49 Do you remember the early streaming? It wasn’t that good.

Rich Ziade: 19:53 It wasn’t that good. They probably had an overlapping strategy where they kept going with the DVDs and kept mailing them. They obliterated Blockbuster.

Paul Ford: 20:04 They did. There was like one last day of DVD. Just for everyone listening, Netflix started as a mail-in DVD business, destroyed the video stores around the country and then Reed Hastings, the CEO said —

Rich Ziade: 20:22 Streaming will come. It wasn’t there. He’s like “It’s going to come and that’s where we’re going to be and we’re going to start on that now.” It was so dramatic such that the revenue business around the DVD mailing was not dead yet. He was essentially saying “I want off.” I want off of it and we’re going to figure that out. It sure as hell wasn’t good for the people who made the plastic envelopes.

Paul Ford: 21:04 It wasn’t good for a lot of people. There were warehouses where the DVDs were, all of that. So is this CEO essentially saying, go and blow up your contracts, because we have these incredible tools?

Rich Ziade: 21:15 Of course not. From what I know of very large consulting firms that work on governance and contracts…

Paul Ford: 21:18 That’s not what they’re saying.

Rich Ziade: 21:20 What they’re going to try to do is sell these new capabilities on top of what they currently do. And look, the day is coming where smaller upstarts are going to say, why are you even doing all that? Where one of the Big Four from across the street will be like, we’ll bring your costs down 30% on what you do and we’ll do it with AI.

Paul Ford: 21:43 It’s real tricky because if they say that to a person who’s giving millions of dollars to PwC every year, but they don’t say that to the person next door who’s giving them millions of dollars a year — you either got to go one way or the other here.

Rich Ziade: 21:54 This is the rub. And so we’re in the beginning of a transformational phase. Firms like ours, who don’t have that difficult decision — I’m not saying I wouldn’t be just as cowardly as the partner at PwC if I had that revenue to lose. I’m not that high-minded.

Paul Ford: 22:13 Yeah, PwC is in the article, but it’s every one of these companies.

Rich Ziade: 22:17 Every one of these companies. We’re young. We are insanely fast at shipping quality software because we don’t have a status quo.

Paul Ford: 22:25 Frankly, that’s our only bet.

Rich Ziade: 22:27 Well, it’s not just that. We are unencumbered by a past. That is a huge, huge advantage.

Paul Ford: 22:32 The funny thing is that we’re not. We continually go back and get really confused at how cheap and fast everything is now.

Rich Ziade: 22:38 We’re still transitioning.

Paul Ford: 22:40 It’s still really hard for us to acknowledge the amount of change that’s happened in our industry. The only clients we serve now are people who were sort of doing the accelerated stuff for them. But every time we sit down and try to figure out our pricing, we keep going back ten years.

Rich Ziade: 22:53 It’s hard. This is a hell of a transition.

Paul Ford: 22:56 Let’s go back to that manager who’s a senior partner with a dozen partners under them and hundreds of people below them.

Rich Ziade: 23:03 That’s right.

Paul Ford: 23:04 There’s this monthly partner dinner. They all smoke cigars and talk about how well everyone’s doing. And then there’s this thing that is really of two minds. One is, it is absolutely an existential threat on the status quo. And the status quo is their revenue. It is the bonuses that they get. Through another lens, it is maybe a new revenue driver. I’ll just say one word: Agentforce.

Rich Ziade: 23:37 Sure.

Paul Ford: 23:38 Everybody’s like, Salesforce is dead, and then they just doubled down, Benioff… You know what he said? He said I may rename Salesforce to Agentforce.

Rich Ziade: 24:03 Oh dear god.

Paul Ford: 24:05 Oh, I mean what a brilliant thing to say.

Rich Ziade: 24:08 Then it becomes Agent Dream at the big conference?

Paul Ford: 24:11 Dream Agent Force.

Rich Ziade: 24:12 Dream Agent Force. Yeah, that’s god.

Paul Ford: 24:14 But you see what he’s trying to say is, do not tell me it’s an either or. I am the future. And I’m also 40% more expensive. But don’t worry about that. That’s literally what he said. He’s like, “you know what? Rather than running from the tornado, I’m a tornado chaser. I’m going to go into it and I’m going to be one.” And he’s very savvy in how he signals and messages.

Rich Ziade: 24:40 He’s probably the best salesperson alive.

Paul Ford: 24:42 Incredible. He literally named his company after sales.

Paul Ford: 24:47 These guys, and I’m not dispelling, but a manager who frankly has done incredibly well to cultivate the culture and the status quo that is in front of him or her has to now look at this thing as potentially disruptive or potentially advantageous, and you got this CEO yammering on about like you better get on it.

Rich Ziade: 25:01 Well, and you’re going to have people solve tax problems using this tool without you in the mix.

Paul Ford: 25:05 Yeah, that’s right.

Rich Ziade: 25:06 So we are going to start cannibalizing a little bit here and there.

Paul Ford: 25:07 Now when will the clients say — and this is from first hand experience, here’s the good news for the likes of PwC. The clients very much still want people right now connecting them to these capabilities. They do not want you to be like, “check it out, did this last night, what do you think?” It’s not great. Money is running through their systems, they worry about a lot of different things, they worry about being too hasty or quick. So people will still matter. I just don’t know if it’s the same people who are combining PDFs. That shift will take a long time. There’s still money to be made, there’s still houses to buy in the Caribbean. So there is a weird disincentive to move too fast and yet the CEO is going to write a thing.

Rich Ziade: 25:47 We’re seeing that with all the big consulting firms. We’re starting to watch them more closely. We got three minutes. Let’s design a consulting firm. That’s not us — we are about building you a product.

Paul Ford: 26:00 No, we will live with you and help you transition to AI as well.

Rich Ziade: 26:04 We’re strategic about it.

Paul Ford: 26:05 But you’re not going to call us to audit your books.

Rich Ziade: 26:09 We are software people. Design that firm. Design the big consulting firm for this new era. What’s it look like?

Paul Ford: 26:12 It’s strategic heavy.

Rich Ziade: 26:15 Okay, what does that mean?

Paul Ford: 26:17 Before you type into the box and start using all these cool tools and Claude Code and Claude Co-work and all this fun stuff, organizations are deeply complex systems that are part people, part computers.

Rich Ziade: 27:00 Understanding that organization, spending time with that and then crafting a solution for that particular organization.

Paul Ford: 27:11 But Rich we already do this. Why would I want to hire Rich Desert House Poopers when I could hire PricewaterhouseCoopers who already send great strategists in?

Rich Ziade: 27:21 No, but Pricewaterhouse, unlike other firms that are more strategy focused, Pricewaterhouse will see the strategy, sit there and spend three weeks and talk through what it should be, and then they bring 200 people. That’s what they sell.

Paul Ford: 27:39 You’re thinking like five.

Rich Ziade: 27:42 I’m thinking five. The strategy part of it is invaluable because AI can’t do it. AI can’t hang out and interview your users, understand your processes. It’ll be useful to study your data, but that expertise of talking to the right people, what are your goals, what’s your five-year goal, that is management consulting of the highest order. That interaction is going to get more expensive. Because the execution side of that strategy is going to get really cheap. The machines are great at execution. But the time spent with those organizations is going to get more expensive. The money’s gone on the other end to some extent and the value is really at the top of the process which is the strategic dialogue.

Paul Ford: 28:45 There’s a real risk coming which is you can have all the software you ever wanted, sounds amazing, that can be a disaster.

Rich Ziade: 28:54 It’s a risk.

Paul Ford: 28:55 Yes. I’ll tell you how I see the future. You ever heard the term data lake?

Rich Ziade: 29:05 I have.

Paul Ford: 29:06 The idea is that you’re going to centralize everything. Those are always huge efforts. Those efforts get a lot easier with vibe coding because it’s easier to migrate things into one consolidated system. I do see a future where you’re going in and saying, look, the future is we’re going to take all your stuff, put it in one place and then we can very tactically spin up any product you need. Sales product, marketing product. Should the sales and marketing products talk to each other? That is going to get so much easier and cheaper, but getting to the decision point, getting the data unlocked and figuring out how it connects —

Rich Ziade: 29:49 Crafting the strategy.

Paul Ford: 29:51 That’s right. Most people don’t have the skills to craft that strategy. I don’t mean that as a put down, it’s a particular skill. A large organization, instead of picking up a platform like SAP or Salesforce and saying this will be the only platform we use, or throwing everything into a “data lake” and hoping that whatever bobs to the surface is useful, can really have a truly well-architected —

Rich Ziade: 30:00 Architected platform that describes their whole business?

Paul Ford: 30:02 Yes. And then they can have any product they want on top of it in relatively short order and those products are now disposable. You can iterate. So it’s a very different culture of tracking, thinking, even the governance parts are going to get a lot more systematized, but there’s no way to skip the cleanup and the organization and the strategy steps in front. So that transformation is on the table and it wasn’t before.

Rich Ziade: 30:27 Yeah, AI is the ultimate transformation tool. I think there are weird disincentives between partners in these large firms, and frankly amongst their clients because they’re risk averse and their numbers look good anyway. It’s like do I really want to deal with this? I’m on COBOL but —

Paul Ford: 30:46 It works.

Rich Ziade: 30:47 It works. My numbers look great.

Paul Ford: 30:52 How many — we’ve talked to tons of companies, and lots of times people come and want transformational change and then when you actually dig in they’re like, “I’m okay really because we’re —”

Rich Ziade: 30:57 It’s not just saying I’m okay. It’s like, “okay, well I want you to talk to Stan.”

Paul Ford: 31:03 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 31:04 And he’s been doing this for 15 years and you show up and you are the Grim Reaper.

Paul Ford: 31:08 Everybody wants the new thing, but they never want to tell Stan no.

Rich Ziade: 31:12 They never want to tell Stan no. That’s a normal thing. Okay, but let’s close out, you define this new consulting, because we don’t think the back end is where — if you think about a company like McKinsey, purely strategic, relatively small, expanded hugely over the last 20 years to cover more digital.

Paul Ford: 31:34 They felt they had to.

Rich Ziade: 31:36 They felt they had to. They were in the room, they’re trusted, the brand is strong. So this has been the move and people are basically — a consulting firm now competes with Accenture, which competes with consulting firms, which competes with PwC. But what you see is a pattern where the strategy up front, in a real platform architecture and really thinking it through, becomes where all of the work is going to be because so much of the work on the back end is going to be following a pattern, letting AI do it and just go.

Paul Ford: 32:02 I think we’ve learned, as we’ve gone into organizations, how strong the political will to resist any change is. It’s not a negative thing, it just is what it is. Eventually everybody’s going to have to loosen up because when the competitor across the street does it, you’re going to have to do it. Once you could get a car on your phone, it was a matter of time for the taxis and the car service companies to reckon with that. That’s coming, it’s just not going to be that fast just because humans are stubborn. There are other mechanisms — there are funds and investors, there’s private equity that buys stuff that’s running inefficiently by design; their whole goal is to make you more efficient.

Paul Ford: 32:44 Oh, they’re excited about this stuff.

Rich Ziade: 32:46 They’re excited about this stuff.

Paul Ford: 32:47 They see this as a way to unlock a lot of problems.

Rich Ziade: 32:49 Yes, and that political resistance is not going to go very far there. They are the owner and they’re going to make it happen one way or the other. That’s a more sledgehammer approach for organizations. Before we let go, I’ll close it with this. There are partners at PWC who are close friends with their clients for 20 years.

Paul Ford: 33:07 Yes.

Rich Ziade: 33:08 That is real. Those relationships go deep. There is an alignment there that’s very strong.

Paul Ford: 33:15 And it’s earned trust.

Rich Ziade: 33:17 It’s not bad. It’s really good.

Paul Ford: 33:20 They’ve worked really hard to build these proactive relationships.

Rich Ziade: 33:23 The spouses come out for dinner together.

Paul Ford: 33:25 Yeah, that’s right.

Rich Ziade: 33:27 That’s a real thing and a meaningful thing for people. So this is something that has shown up and it’s a rainbow-colored tornado that is spinning at everything. Some things will move more quickly than others, but it’ll take time.

Paul Ford: 33:41 Yeah, everybody’s still going out to that nice steakhouse. That’s real.

Rich Ziade: 33:44 That’s real.

Paul Ford: 33:45 Yep.

Rich Ziade: 33:46 All right, so what does Aboard do? We believe that AI is a transformational tool and we embrace that. We come in, we spend time with you and we craft a solution. We’re really good at getting it to a credible place very quickly. So it looks like a demo within a week, but it’s actually a lot more than that. We have an amazing process and pipeline for building reliable software with this stuff. And we also understand we got to spend time with you first. So give us a call. hello@aboard.com.

Paul Ford: 34:15 The way to start that is that email goes straight to you and me and to the team —

Rich Ziade: 34:21 We’re small and nimble. We’d love to talk to you.

Paul Ford: 34:24 hello@aboard.com, check out our website aboard.com. We would love a good rating for the podcast, some thumbs up on YouTube.

Rich Ziade: 34:31 I want to close it with this Paul, we made some friends at PWC, we love you guys, we think you’re great.

Paul Ford: 34:37 Oh yeah, I didn’t see this as critical, just like here’s the PWC CEO saying it to half a million people. That I think is an interesting moment to talk about. They’re great. There’s tons of great people there.

Rich Ziade: 34:46 I’m going to write a rap song for PWC that I’ll sing next week. Do you sing a rap song or do you rap it?

Paul Ford: 34:53 Just even asking that question is really bad.

Rich Ziade: 34:57 All right.

Paul Ford: 34:58 Have a lovely week.

Rich Ziade: 34:59 Bye.