If you discovered AI had drafted large chunks of a report you'd paid a Big 4 consultancy $435k to deliver, how would you react?

The mayor of Wellington recently did just that. But the internet is outraged about the wrong thing.

Last November, Deloitte recommended Wellington City Council cut 20% of its staff, with ChatGPT to pick up the slack. However, the analysis subsequently turned out to be flawed. And now it turns out AI wrote the report, too. Based on the way it's being reported, it seems that last part is the biggest sin of all.

I disagree.

I've worked with big consultancies, as a client, and seen how reports get made. A partner doesn't painstakingly write every word because it's not the best use of their time. Instead, a junior drafts it and the partner reviews it before ultimately signing their name. When you hire a consultancy, you're paying for judgement, you're not paying for a professional writer.

Clients know this and nobody thinks it's a scandal. So, AI writing the draft shouldn't be one either.

But here's the thing that should.

It appears that AI did this work without adequate oversight or review. That's not a new failure. That's the oldest consultancy failure of all. It's sending out a junior's work under a partner's name without the partner applying the judgement layer in the middle. It doesn't matter if the junior is a 22 year old university graduate, or an LLM by the name of Claude, the review process should be the same either way.

Judgement is one of the few areas where humans can still beat AI and it's what Wellington City Council was paying for here.

The mistake in Wellington was never that AI wrote some of the words. It's that nobody applied their judgement to reviewing them.

Talk again soon,

Dr Genevieve Hayes.

p.s. Thank you to Matt O'Mara for sharing this news item with me.