For fifteen years of my life, I lived inside the fortress of information asymmetry. I was part of a payments consulting business, and our model was exactly what Andrew Feldman described on a recent Moonshots episode when he pointed a sharp finger at traditional professional services.
His observation was simple, cutting, and entirely true:
“Their role today is to stand between ordinary people and obscure knowledge. And the application of that obscure knowledge to everyday problems.”
When I heard him say that, it landed with a quiet thud of recognition.
For a decade and a half, my colleagues and I were the ones standing in that gap. The payments industry—with its labyrinth of interchange fees, compliance structures, clearing networks, and legacy tech stacks—is a monument to obscure knowledge. Clients didn’t come to us because we possessed some divine, unreplicable wisdom. They came to us because the map was locked in our heads, and navigating the terrain without us was a recipe for an expensive disaster.
We charged for our time, and we earned it. We untangled complexity and solved real, everyday business problems for people who just wanted to move money safely from point A to point B.
But looking back now, I can see the architectural flaw disguised as a premium service. The economic foundation of that entire era relied on friction. It relied on the fact that it took an immense amount of human energy to retrieve a piece of obscure data and map it onto a specific business dilemma. You weren’t just paying for strategic guidance; you were paying a premium on artificial scarcity.
We are living through a moment where the marginal cost of intelligence is rapidly trending toward zero. When the barrier of “obscure knowledge” evaporates, the traditional toll bridges begin to look absurd.
For anyone starting a consulting business today, the playbook would have to be entirely different. When an LLM can parse thousands of pages of network operating rules, interchange tables, and regulatory compliance frameworks in a handful of seconds, the gatekeeper’s standing ground liquefies.
If your value proposition is merely standing between a client and a hidden database, your business model isn’t just flawed—it’s obsolete.
Yet, this collapses into a fascinating paradox. You might assume that when you democratize expertise, you eliminate the need for the expert. But as Dan Shipper recently observed, the reality of AI is completely counterintuitive.
Shipper points out that AI effectively packages up “yesterday’s competence” and makes it cheap and ubiquitous.
Suddenly, anyone can generate a complex contract, a software pull request, or a payments flow strategy with the click of a button. But when cheap competence skyrockets, adoption explodes, resulting in an unprecedented glut of generic output—what the internet has collectively taken to calling “slop”. It’s the default, lazy answer that lacks soul, context, and nuance.
When everything begins to look and smell the same, a strange thing happens: the market’s demand for genuine difference sky-rockets.
The shift we are facing across all professional services—whether legal, financial, or consulting—isn’t about eliminating the expert. It is about changing the expert’s job from data-retriever to orchestrator and judge. The floor has been raised. Yesterday’s ceiling is today’s baseline.
What remains is the ability to read a room. To watch a client’s shoulders tighten when you present an option that’s technically correct but organizationally impossible. To notice the glance exchanged across the table before anyone speaks. No LLM parses that. The map is universal now; the guide still has to be in the room.
We don’t need fewer guides; we need fewer toll booths. The future of consulting doesn’t belong to those who hoard the map. It belongs to those who use a universally available map to help people actually walk the terrain.
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