Vibe consulting
Everyone can generate AI roadmaps now. The scarce skill is vibe consulting — carrying overnight drafts into executive rooms and back, without pretending v1 is final.
Everyone can generate the content now.
Give a decent model enough context, a clear goal, and a patient prompt, and you get a roadmap. Milestones. Deliverables. Roles to consider. Estimations, if you ask nicely. The output is often intelligent enough to start a conversation. That part is no longer rare.
The scarce part is consulting.
Not the pyramid kind. Vibe consulting, for lack of a cleaner industry label. You receive a technical architecture, a solution sketch, a platform decision, something built or drafted overnight. Your job is to carry it into a room of business stakeholders, make it sound like a decision they can own, survive the questions, bring the feedback back to the builders, and call that progress without lying about how finished it is.
That is a different skill from prompting. Prompting gets you artifacts. Vibe consulting gets you a decision.
Generation is table stakes
I see this pattern weekly.
A programme needs a target operating model. Someone produces a credible first draft in an evening. Dependencies mapped. Phases named. Risks listed in the right font. The team arrives in the morning with something, which is already better than the old blank-slide Tuesday.
The mistake is to treat that something as the product.
The product is still judgment under scrutiny. Can this survive procurement? Can risk sign without inventing a new committee? Will the person who owns operations in year two recognise themselves in the diagram? Does the executive sponsor hear a plan, or hear a template they have seen on three other pilots?
When those answers are weak, the problem is rarely model quality. It is consulting quality. The generator did its job. The human bridge did not.
The meeting where everyone has the same deck
High-level forums are where this gets visible.
Someone presents with confidence. The narrative is smooth. The structure is familiar. Cloud on the left. Platform in the middle. Governance on the right. A roadmap that could also describe your home automation project, a family dinner logistics plan, or last quarter’s unrelated pilot. Same bones. Same polite arrows. Same vibe.
Experienced people feel it before they prove it. They have seen the pattern. They ask one sharp question. Who owns the hand-off? What breaks if we pause at phase two? Where is the evidence this ran outside a sandbox? The presenter answers with tone, not with detail. The room goes quiet in the particular way that means we will discuss this later without you.
I am not mocking speed. Speed is useful. I am mocking false completeness. A deck that looks executive because it uses executive shapes, not because anyone executive has stress-tested it.
Two fronts at once
Real vibe consulting runs in two directions.
Outward. Technical to business. Strip jargon without stripping truth. Name trade-offs in language a steering group can act on. Make the expensive parts visible early. Do not smuggle architecture inside adjectives.
Inward. Business to builders. Feedback in a form engineers can execute. Priorities that survive contact with dependencies. Scope cuts that are explicit, not implied. A list of what is not decided yet, which is often the most valuable export from the room.
People who only vibe-code struggle here. People who only vibe-present struggle here too. The job is the loop, not the artifact.
When you get called out
This is the part I wish more teams would practice out loud.
Someone asks the honest question. Was this vibe-coded last night? The room wants to know if they are being asked to approve a sketch dressed as a strategy.
A bad answer is performance. A worse answer is denial.
A useful answer sounds like this.
Yes. I used AI heavily to get a first shape on the table. I do not have every detail right. I can explain the intent, what I am confident about, and what needs a proper pass with the people who will operate it. If the direction makes sense, we continue in version two and three with the right owners in the room.
That reply is not shame. It is vibe consulting done honestly. It sets expectations. It separates exploration from commitment. It gives experienced stakeholders permission to help instead of catch you out.
The teams that win are not the ones that pretend the overnight draft is final. They are the ones that consult quickly, label the draft honestly, and iterate in public.
Sometimes the old tools still win
There is a corrective I keep relearning.
Not every decision needs a generated deck. Some problems need a whiteboard, a senior operator, a one-page decision record, and a calendar invite with the right six people. Old tools. Slow tools. Tools that leave fingerprints.
Vibe coding without vibe consulting can become monkey business at both ends. Generate. Present. Improvise. Generate again. Present again. Plenty of motion. Limited existential value, because nobody with real experience can tell who owns the outcome.
When the stakes are high, I still reach for the boring instruments. Workshop notes. A RACI someone will actually update. A architecture decision record with a name on it. A pilot measured in weeks, not slides. The AI draft can sit beside those tools. It should not replace the obligation to decide.
What to hire and what to practice
If you are building a transformation function, do not only hire for prompt fluency. Hire for vibe consulting.
Can this person explain a model route to a CFO without embarrassment? Can they bring a risk challenge back to engineering as a scoped task? Can they stand in a room and say version one, not final without losing authority?
If you are an individual practitioner, the opportunity is the same. Generation is cheap. Credible vibe consulting is not. That is where small teams punch above headcount. Not because the slides are prettier. Because the person in the room has shipped before, and you can tell.
Practical habits that help.
- Label drafts. Version, date, owner, known gaps. On the first slide, not in the appendix nobody opens.
- Separate explore from commit. Different meetings, different audiences, different language.
- Keep a human sign-off step for anything that leaves your laptop for a governance forum.
- Use AI for breadth, use experts for load-bearing claims.
- When called out, agree and improve. Speed is an advantage only if honest versioning is allowed.
The market is moving here
My read is simple.
The market is not paying a premium forever for can generate a plausible plan. It will pay for can consult a plan into a decision, under skepticism, across functions, without bullshit.
Vibe coding will keep getting faster. Templates will keep multiplying. The visual sameness will get worse before it gets better. Experience will show up as the ability to tell the difference, and to help the room move anyway.
That is vibe consulting. Not a slogan. A job. One I think many of us are already doing, whether we have named it yet or not.
Field note from the build-in-public log. NDA-safe, no client names. If this matches what you are seeing in steering rooms, get in touch.