Quick Money Generates Armies of Newborn Trainers and Consultants

This might seem like an angry post, but it's just an observation.

Quick money generates armies of newborn trainers and consultants.

I have been seeing this over the last decade with Agile, Kanban and Scrum. I was a part of that crowd, launching my consulting practice as early as 2008 after just 4 years of successful Scrum experience.

The issue is that the AI engineering wave is at least 10x faster. And this can't be healthy.

In the previous era it took almost a decade for the market to learn, mature and saturate. We had time to learn from our mistakes and improve. Personally, I made a lot of consulting mistakes and hopefully became a better one over 18 years of practice.

This time, market saturation happened almost over a few months. Too fast to learn anything. Too soon to figure out where real value is.

In 2026 the AI consultants are already competing on price. You can get a class for as little as a few hundred euros per person or even less. And many things are available for free. The market is already crashing.

Another difference between these two waves is that the recommendations and guidelines of the Agile wave were more or less stable and when done right could benefit teams and individuals for good several years.

In this new AI age, the white papers turn into yellow press in just several weeks. Very few pieces of advice that were given three months ago can be applied directly. The models have improved to the state where for instance "prompt engineering" that was a "big thing" in 2025 is almost irrelevant now.

I am sure I am biased saying that I think that a lot of folks from the "Agile crowd" really had a big heart for organizational change. Very rarely had they the proper mandate to implement their dreamt changes and were at times naïve about how organizational behavior works, but they had good intentions and deep care towards individuals and interactions. They really tried to create a better world for all of us.

I attended a few dozen agile coach camps and interacted with hundreds and hundreds of lean and agile practitioners to know that to see deep love for people and quality.

Of this new AI crowd, frankly, I am not sure. What is your real motivation for becoming a trainer? What is your value set? Principles? Is there anything that is not OK? Is there something you will not do for money?

Dark factories, for instance. Is it your best dream?

It seems to me — and I don't want to cast a shadow on everybody — but this new wave attracts a lot of technocrats and also folks without real experience in organizational change or human psychology. And that combination and the level of ignorance can be as harmful as powerful.

So if you were a company or a leader looking to hire an AI trainer-consultant, I recommend having a slow discussion about human stuff first: principles, stories of real change. Do not be overwhelmed with new jargon and novelty — try finding a stable layer of humanity that was there before the AI age.