Where do senior advisers come from?

Everyone is asking whether AI will replace consultants. I think it’s the wrong question. The partners of 2046 are the juniors of today, and they become partners by doing the routine work: the first drafts, the boring spreadsheets, the reports nobody reads twice. That’s where judgment gets built.

So what happens when that routine work gets handed to a generic AI? Productivity goes up, sure. But the place where expertise was formed quietly disappears. You won’t see it this year. You’ll see it in twenty years, in who’s left to sign the reports.

That’s the argument of Formed, not prompted: an open-access, MPhil-style thesis on the proletarianisation of advisory. The word is borrowed from the idea of craftspeople losing their know-how to the machines that replaced their gestures. Here it’s about advisers losing the path that made them advisers.

What’s in it

Eleven chapters, written from inside European infrastructure advisory:

• the framework: why a faster tool can leave a firm weaker, and how expertise materialises in people rather than in documents;
• the political economy of AI mediation: who controls the tools, and whose reasoning they carry;
• adjacent professions: what software, law, medicine and audit can teach us;
• the formation pathway, stage by stage, and what changes at each step;
• four futures, as thought experiments rather than forecasts;
• and recommendations for consultants, partners and firms.

Plus annexes, a glossary of 34 concepts, a two-page executive summary for partners, and a plain-language version of every chapter. Because a thesis about judgment that only experts can read would be a bit ironic, innit?

There’s even a /for-ai/ page, for the AI agents browsing the site on someone’s behalf. It felt only fair.

How it was made

The first full draft was done in June (reviewed with Fable, which was humbling), the lay-reader docs followed, and the site got a major rework over the summer. Yes, I used Claude to help draft and edit it. The argument and the judgment calls are mine, which is kind of the whole point =)

So…

It’s at version 0.5.5 and very much alive. You can read it online at formednotprompted.com, get the ebook (PDF/ePub, pay what you want), and corrections or disagreements are welcome through GitHub issues or pull requests. It’s licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.