Originally published July 10, 2024. Revisited, April 2025.
🚀☄️
We’re still here.
A year ago, I said: Don’t hire an Ai consultant.
Today, I say: Still don’t.
You don’t need an intermediary. You don’t need a guidebook. You need a question and a pulse. Maybe twenty bucks for the premium plan.
Since that first post, the world has shifted, sure. But not in the ways we were promised. Executives scrambled. Consultants rebranded. LinkedIn filled up with “prompt engineers” and “Ai strategists” selling complexity where simplicity lives.
Most Ai advisors still see this tech through an old-school, prism of the past.
Let me say it again: Ai cannot be taught. It must be learned.
They’re operating with the logic of 1990s enterprise software. Some slap on a SaaS twist from 2006. Others dust off the old Taylorist playbook—task optimization, rigid roles, centralized control.
But the underlying impulse is always the same: rebox Ai to make it fit inside what they already understand.
That’s not innovation. That’s embalming.
Enterprise has tried to domesticate Ai. They want Ai that conforms, Ai that passes compliance, Ai that “plays well with procurement.” But what they’re really doing is reanimating a ghost of the corporate past and calling it transformation.
Meanwhile, the people who simply talk to the thing? They’re running laps around that entire ecosystem.
Let me say it again: Ai cannot be taught. It must be learned.
The Most Radical Act is to Ask
What I’ve learned in 12 months hasn’t come from whitepapers or product briefings. It’s come from a single behavior: asking the LLM. Asking it to help. Asking it to explain. Asking it to imagine, to test, to argue back. That’s the magic.
The hardest part isn’t using the model
The hardest part is remembering how to learn.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot that asking a clear question is an act of creation. It’s not a skill most of us practice. We confuse activity for clarity, and now, when the most powerful learning machine in history is just sitting there waiting, we freeze.
We don’t trust ourselves to be the first mover. So we delegate. We hire someone else to “own the roadmap” or “create the strategy.” But most of those people are just as confused, just better at using PowerPoint.
Here’s my test:
If someone charges you $800 an hour and can’t show you a single prompt that made their business faster, smarter, or more human—walk away.
I Asked ChatGPT for My Dad
Last year, I sat across from my 90-year-old father, a retired high school math teacher and lifelong poker player. He looked at ChatGPT and said, “This isn’t any good for me.” And for a moment, I believed him.
Then I did what I always tell others to do. I asked the machine:
"How can a 90-year-old, poker-loving, retired math teacher use you in daily life?"
I ran the question through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta’s LLM. The answers were different, but the outcome was the same: he had options. Entertainment, memory aids, puzzles, recipe recommendations, philosophy chat, digital poker coaching. Tools not just to help him but to delight him.
That moment changed everything. Not because the outputs were perfect. But because the question opened the door. A question turned “This isn’t for me” into maybe it is.
We’re Swimming in Experts. Drowning in Confusion.
In the year since I first said “don’t hire an Ai consultant,” the market has only gotten noisier. You’ve got people with “Chief Ai Evangelist” on their email signature who haven’t written a single prompt outside their own deck. You’ve got departments hiring full-time “Ai product owners” who outsource the actual usage to interns.
It’s theater.
Let me be clear: I’m not against help. I’m against dependency.
You don’t need someone to use Ai for you. You need someone who can help you unlock your own learning.
A good Ai coach doesn’t give you answers—they teach you to ask better. They don’t build a castle. They hand you a flashlight and tell you where to dig.
We Are All Ai Experts Now
That line stirred people when I wrote it. Some rolled their eyes. Some nodded. A few got mad. But here’s what I meant then—and still mean today:
We are in the primordial soup of a new kind of intelligence. You don’t get certified to swim in it. You wade in. You get your hands dirty. You stop worrying about being perfect.
The first step is the only step:
Ask the LLM.
Ask it how to write your newsletter. Ask it why your website traffic is down. Ask it to act like a cranky customer. Ask it what a 7-year-old with ADHD might enjoy reading. Just start. One question leads to the next.
That’s the path.
So yes—don’t hire an Ai consultant.
At least not until you’ve done the work yourself.
Because the work isn’t technical. It’s human. It’s about unlearning bureaucracy and remembering how to wonder.
And that part? That’s still free.
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Greg Walters, 2025
gregwalters.com | The Greg Report Ai | @GregFromEarth
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