Why are so many people in this space pretending they are AI experts or have years of AI delivery experience?
For context: I have been at the forefront of this space for the past 2 years in a leadership/strategy /client engagement position but also from a technical/R&D internal enablement position at a very large global firm and very early into my consulting career. Through happenstance I was selected by executive leadership due to drive, reputation, continued reliability, base level understanding, and closeness to the technology. I understand firms pretending to be more competent or forward thinking in RFPs/client engagement to get customer buy in but individuals are pretending everywhere. Coming from a semi-technical but not necessarily enterprise background it has been surprising and kind of annoying for every single director, principal, delivery lead to pretend they are “AI leaders” because they got a few certificates and have seniority. Meanwhile they can’t explain to me what a semantic kernel is, the efficacy of MCPs vs CLIs, complexity of multi-agent systems in legacy systems, state management, harnesses, fine tuning, and have zero AI wins under their belt outside of a POC LLM wrapper chatbot that some gut stitched together with ChatGPT and got scrapped once it was in a client environment. The other day I went to a workshop where members of different firms(some in the big 4) were invited and every single one was clearly clueless about the topics after commentary and discussion yet they are their firm’s “AI Leaders” they’ve chosen to represent them. The other month I also had a guy internally with 15+ years of experience try to push his way into my team with some executive support but after a few conversations about feasible contributions(functional use cases, technical speciality, GTM strategy) I quickly realized this was a case of clout chasing to get visibility with no actual usefulness and dead it.
- Is this normal in consulting for people to lie and claim they’re the expert in the latest emerging trend?
- What is the point of this? Surely they know if they’re using it to leverage externally that they’ll be called out in any technical interview. Job security? Internal promotions?
- Is there a way to differentiate from this saturated moat if I’m really that person?
- Have you seen this at your own places of work?
- Is this having a negative impact to our space with false promises by false leaders delivering useless POCs to clients thus creating more hesitance towards enterprise adoption?