AI Consulting: The Billion-Dollar Opportunity You're Missing in 2024

The article under discussion and this video are a little misleading. Only a fraction of the work they are claiming as GenAI is anything we consider GenAI work. There is a lot of GenAI curiosity but very little GenAI budget out there right now. This is a combination of good old risk aversion, macro economic headwinds, and very large amounts of confusion and misunderstanding. A few people here and there are pursuing small POCs, but virtually nobody outside of dedicated GenAI companies is pursuing GenAI aggressively. While LLM development has been crazy fast, even the big players are moving very slowly on the application front. ChatGPT, for all its fame, advances at a snail's pace, and if Microsoft is investing in their Copilots, its not very evident in the end product. This has done a lot to dampen excitement and squashed a lot of investment. Combined with the general IT downturn, you should not expect to find work pursuing GenAI. In consulting, it continues to be about who you know first, what is your proven track record solving problem almost identical to mine second, and how far below market rates you're willing to go 3rd. I suspect GenAI work will pick up a lot of steam in 2025. As more success stories circulate, people's jitters will ease up, and models will become "good/cheap/fast enough" for a wider array of applications, and frameworks, platforms, libraries etc will become more mature. At a certain point, the FOMO we've been expecting for the last 18 months will finally materialize, and every company will jump in. Then it will begin to feel like the .COM era, except that a lot of the work will be done by AI, so the opportunities for humans will be lessened.