We observe the corporate landscape at a moment of transition, where the old machinery continues to turn long after its purpose has faded. In this twilight, the technology consultant makes one final circuit of the executive floors - a ritual as predictable as it is obsolete.
There is a certain calm desperation to their movements.
AI has begun to strip away the fog in which they once operated, illuminating every corridor with a clarity that leaves little room for interpretation, and even less for mystique. Yet the consultants continue, clutching their frameworks and archetypes like relics from a vanished age.
For now, organisations still summon them.
The language of “transformation,” “alignment,” and “readiness” echoes through boardrooms, creating the comforting illusion of motion. PowerPoint decks proliferate like architectural models for cities that will never be built.
But beneath this activity lies a faint stillness, as if everyone understands - but refuses to articulate - that the centre no longer holds.
AI quietly performs the very work consultants once guarded:
- mapping patterns
- revealing contradictions
- generating strategies
- designing processes
- exposing the hidden architecture beneath daily operations
The consultant’s authority once derived from ambiguity.
Now ambiguity is in retreat.
In this environment, the consultant appears less like a guide and more like a figure observed behind glass - an artefact of the managerial imagination, performing gestures that once produced meaning but now only signal the memory of meaning.
This is not a new priesthood.
It is the last ceremony of the old one.
We record this not as critique but as documentation, a field observation of a species whose habitat is evaporating. Soon, the rooms they inhabit will be repurposed, the rituals automated, the language archived.
And the age that sustained them will be understood as a temporary weather pattern -
a brief storm before the air cleared.