Consulting in the age of cheap intelligence.

The deck used to be the deliverable. A team of bright people would spend six weeks producing one hundred and twenty slides, and the slides would be the artifact the client paid for. The slides justified the engagement. The slides were the work.

The slides are now a commodity. A junior with a good prompt can produce a hundred and twenty plausible slides in an afternoon. The deck is no longer scarce. What was scarce, all along, was the thinking behind the deck, and now that the deck no longer hides the absence of thinking, the absence has nowhere to go.

This is, on balance, good news for consultants who can actually think. It is bad news for the ones who could not, and were getting paid anyway because the deck looked impressive. The market is repricing in real time.

What remains valuable, and is in fact more valuable than ever, is judgment. Knowing which question is the right question. Knowing which of three plausible directions is the one that survives contact with reality. Knowing when to stop, when to escalate, when to tell the client something they do not want to hear. None of this is being automated soon, because none of it is really about producing artifacts. It is about being a particular kind of reader of a particular kind of situation.

The long conversation, the one that happens over months and across many small decisions, is the actual product. The memo is its artifact. The deck, if there is one, is a souvenir.

We started Memo Writers on the bet that this shift is real and durable. So far, the bet is paying off. The teams we work with do not want more slides. They want a smaller number of better sentences, and someone to sit across the table while they decide what to do about them.

That is consulting in the age of cheap intelligence. Less production. More thought. The same job it always was, with the scaffolding stripped away.