EP276 Your AI Strategy Is a Hammer. Where's the Nail? - with David Cohen

"We need AI" is the most common brief in business right now. David Cohen's read on what it means: usually nothing in particular.

David is the founder of Superposition, a consultancy for data and AI consultancies - a meta consultancy, as he calls it. He's spent his career inside both big and boutique consulting shops, which makes him refreshingly blunt about what's actually happening in the services world right now.

His diagnosis is that we're still in the solution-in-search-of-a-problem stage. Everybody's curious. Everybody's excited. There's enormous movement, enormous hype, and very few real outcomes. And most organizations hiring AI help have not identified the problem they're hiring it to solve.

Susan pushes on the bigger question underneath: if we're in the knowledge era and knowledge just got cheap, what happens to everyone who sells expertise for a living? David's answer is that knowledge didn't lose value - access did. What's scarce now is contextualized knowledge. The kind that accounts for internal politics, history, and the things no system can pick up from the outside.

Also in this one: why consulting content is so relentlessly boring, what surprised Susan when she asked clients why they hired her, and the two words that should precede any AI purchase.

About David Cohen David Cohen is the founder of Superposition, a consultancy built for data and AI consultancies. He's a lifelong consultant with both big-firm and boutique experience, and over a decade of delivering data and AI transformation work at F500 scale. He now advises boutique founders on the existential problems of running a firm - go-to-market, positioning, pricing models, and hiring. He builds his workshops and content to be collaborative and genuinely fun, on the theory that the consulting world has more than enough beige. He's based in Dallas.

What we get into (00:58) Schrödinger's data consultants - where the name Superposition comes from

(02:39) Why he serves other consultants, and the personal story behind it

(04:31) What clients actually mean when they say "we need AI" (spoiler: FOMO)

(06:03) The scale check - the average person does not care about AI tools

(07:38) Automation has existed for decades. Generative AI is not the origin story

(09:39) The two things every consultant is really selling - expertise and risk mitigation