Freelancers

Since LLMs went mainstream, the number of “Experts” has exploded.

I do not mean the physical trades. Nobody becomes a plumber because ChatGPT explained pipes to them once. Intellectual work, though, has proved far easier to costume. AI has made it cheap to perform expertise, not necessarily to possess it.

I now get eight or nine offers a week for lead generation, ghostwriting, website redesign or AI training. Mostly from people whose own work suggests they are selling the thing long before they have properly learned it.

Now imagine you hire someone to train your team on AI.

During a chat with the trainer, you discover that their actual experience is mostly using ChatGPT. They have never used agentic AI productively, but they are explaining it to your staff. Their slides were made with AI. Their training was built with AI. Their confidence is probably generated too.

Is that real AI enablement, or compliance theatre?

The attendees might learn something. A basic session is not worthless. But there is a difference between someone who can explain AI because they asked a chatbot, and someone who can teach it because they have actually used it on real problems.

That matters especially now, when companies are being told they need AI literacy, AI adoption and AI governance, often all at once. The temptation will be to buy the tidy-looking workshop, tick the internal training box, and move on.

But a training session is not the same as competence.

So how do you tell the difference before you sign? Ask them to show, not tell. What have they actually built, and can they open it and walk you through it? Can they work a real problem of yours live, in the room, rather than play back a polished deck? Ask which tools they reached for and why, and more importantly when AI was the wrong answer, because anyone who has truly done the work has been burned and learned where it fails. Ask who they have done this for, and ring those people.

The pretender deals in abstractions and agentic buzzwords.

The practitioner has scars, opinions and receipts.