I. The Chisel Metaphor – A Warning for AI Strategy
Let’s begin with an analogy: If you were tasked with digging a tunnel through a mountain — not just a hole, but a usable, engineered passage for trains, electrical systems, and people — would you pick up a chisel?
That’s what many organizations are doing today. They’re excited about AI. But they’re wielding chisels — specifically, chat-based AI tools. A single prompt, a single output. That’s fine for isolated, granular tasks — like rewriting an email, summarizing an article, or brainstorming bullet points. But what if the problem is vast, multidimensional, and high-stakes? What if you need not just ideas, but infrastructure?
This is the mountain.
And many teams are stuck chiseling.
Some respond by throwing more chisels at it — agents, scripts, automations — the 100-monkeys problem. But 100 chisels don’t equal a tunnel. At best, you get holes and rubble. At worst, a collapse.
II. A Better Way: Cognitive AI — Tunnel Building at Enterprise Scale
Cognitive AI is not about chiseling harder or faster. It’s about stepping back and orchestrating the entire operation — like a tunnel-building organization. This is the next paradigm of AI capability — and it’s here.
At Mindcorp.ai, this is how we work. We model how elite teams function to solve complex challenges: multi-step plans, multiple roles, orchestrated workflows, iterative learning, collaborative sensemaking. And then we encode that into AI workflows.
Instead of chiseling away manually, we run large, agentic, multi-step projects in the cloud. Each project might include:
- 50 to 100+ steps
- Dozens of key objectives
- Tens of thousands of queries
- Thousands of tasks — research, reasoning, hypothesis testing, data extraction, synthesis
- Contributions and review by humans in the loop
- Final deliverables — insights, visualizations, strategies, briefings
That’s not a chisel. That’s a digital organization — one that can map the mountain, plan the tunnel, dig it, wire it, secure it, and get your trains running.
III. The New Role of Consultants — From Tool Use to AI Strategy Leadership
Management consultants have a new mandate: to guide clients through this transformation — from chiseling to orchestrating.
This isn’t about showing clients how to use ChatGPT. It’s about helping them redesign how they generate insight, strategy, and decision-making — using AI to enhance the entire value chain of knowledge work.
Consultants must shift from being end-users of AI tools to becoming designers of AI-powered systems. This creates new revenue, new engagement models, and new value to clients.
Consulting is tunnel-building too.
Consulting work involves many complex steps that need to be orchestrated to help clients navigate through mountains:
- Map the terrain (diagnostic and strategic analysis)
- Identify the obstacle (the mountain: complexity, overload, competition)
- Design the solution (the tunnel: new ways of working)
- Build and deploy it (execution and change management)
- Equip the client to use it (enablement and growth)
Cognitive AI is your new construction crew.
IV. Rethinking the Talent Curve — AI’s True Disruption is Non-Obvious
BCG’s “Jagged Frontier” study showed AI had the biggest relative performance gain for lower performers. That’s widely read as proof that AI is a tool for underdogs.
But that misses the deeper opportunity: Cognitive AI is not about making low performers adequate — it’s about freeing high performers to perform higher.
Mindcorp’s approach is designed to amplify the high performers — the strategic thinkers, decision-makers, domain experts — by removing their bottlenecks:
- Legwork and data prep
- Surface-level synthesis
- Information overload
- Endless search and summarization
Instead of thinking harder, they can think higher — because they now have time and cognitive capacity to do so.
AI may replace some low performers, but its real value is in letting the top 10% spend more of their time doing what only they can do.
And for the mid-tier? AI is a career escalator. With the right tooling, a mid-level performer can suddenly operate at a high level — more insight, more creativity, more leverage. This shifts organizational dynamics: more high performers, less overhead, faster time to value.
V. Insight Velocity and Cost — The Hidden Economic Disruptors
AI changes the economics of insight:
- Time to insight drops from weeks to hours
- Cost per insight falls dramatically
- Depth and breadth of insight increases — more data, more angles, more comparisons
These changes reshape strategy work, due diligence, planning, and innovation. It’s no longer about who has the best ideas — it’s about who gets to insight fastest and turns it into action first.
VI. The Bigger Picture — From Overload to Empowerment
The internet reduced the cost of transactions — and in doing so, removed a natural filter. Now everything is possible, and we’re overwhelmed.
AI — if used right — becomes a new filter. Not just a gatekeeper, but a guide. It can scale to match the overload, and cut through it to surface the meaningful.
It can help humans think better, not just faster.
It gives us a chance to escape the cognitive debt of the last 30 years — and finally get back to using our time to imagine, to explore, and to create.
VII. Strategic Takeaways for Consultants
- Audit Your Tools – Are you chiseling or orchestrating? Evaluate your AI stack accordingly.
- Map Client Problems – Is the challenge a document, a process, or a system? Scale your AI accordingly.
- Design Workflows, Not Prompts – Think in projects, steps, objectives, reviews — not just conversations.
- Focus on Cognitive Multipliers – Where can AI amplify human thinking, not just automate it?
- Lead the Change – Your clients need strategic AI partners, not tool-tips. Be the one who helps them scale their insight generation.
- Package It as Consulting IP – Turn your AI orchestration know-how into a repeatable offering. This is the new consulting leverage.
VIII. Final Thought
AI should not replace human wisdom, creativity, or intuition. It should clear the path so those capabilities can finally operate at full capacity.
Give people their superpowers back.
Stop chiseling.
Build tunnels.