Beware Of The Snake Oil Salesman

A Snake Oil Salesman is someone who sells something they claim works but doesn’t. They do it with a lot of confident, flashy persuasion to distract from the lack of substance.

AI has made it easier than ever to become one.

Here’s how this plays out in professional services:

We used to sell work based on institutional knowledge of our disciplines. Mine is accounting and finance. Yours might be marketing or sales.

AI has made it easy for me to think I’m a marketer. I can put together a monthly newsletter, “design” graphics, build brand templates, and schedule posts. I’ve done all of it.

But here’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why a campaign underperforms. I don’t know how to diagnose weak positioning versus weak copy versus the wrong channel entirely. I don’t know what questions to ask when the numbers are bad. I can produce the deliverables I’ve seen marketers produce and I can do it fast but I have no framework for what good actually looks like underneath.

If you hired me as your marketer and something broke, I wouldn’t know where to start. I’d just make a new graphic.

That’s the trap. The deliverables are visible. The judgment behind them isn’t.

In my field, financial statements and accounting memos are the deliverable. What the Generalist AI won’t see is the hundreds of hours it took to prepare those. Going through versions one through ten, signing off on comments because things didn’t foot or tie to supporting schedules. The words foot or tie might not mean anything to them, but those are two of the most important words in financial statement preparation.

Here’s what it actually costs:

A mid-market company hires a generalist AI firm to automate their revenue recognition process. The vendor builds something that looks impressive.  Dashboards, automated journal entries, clean outputs. Six months later, auditors flag the revenue during a fundraise. The AI was recognizing revenue at contract execution instead of over the performance obligation period that’s what we call ASC 606. The vendor had never heard of it they were just automating your invoice generation.

The fix was a restatement. Delayed close. A fundraise that almost fell apart.

The dashboard looked great. The judgment was missing.

People who haven’t studied, failed, gotten back up, and failed again in their discipline don’t know where the skeletons hide. They don’t know that the high-risk areas live in the judgment calls you have to make and defend. Even in something as deterministic as accounting, there’s gray area. People pay for the gray area. The judgment.

This matters because when someone promises to bring your accounting function “into the future using AI,” they don’t know how to build AI into the judgment calls, the ones we all have to stand behind. A professional who actually understands their discipline knows where the landmines are and can guide AI through them successfully. That’s the difference.

Our Competitive Advantage

The best AI implementations in professional services aren’t coming from generalist AI firms. They’re coming from practitioners who got tired of doing things the slow way and figured out how to automate the parts that didn’t require their judgment, so they could spend more time on the parts that did.

A 20-year accountant who learns AI doesn’t just build faster workflows. They build the right guardrails. They know which outputs need a human check and why. They know the question the AI can’t or shouldn’t answer yet.  They know where to insert the human in the loop.

That’s the competitive advantage sitting inside every experienced professional services firm right now. The domain knowledge is already there. The AI is learnable. The combination is what we’ve found clients are willing to pay top dollar for.

You’ll know a Snake Oil Salesman when you see them. They lead with the technology. They can’t tell you where it breaks. Nobody on their team has done the actual work.

The firms that win the next decade won’t be the ones who adopted AI the fastest. They’ll be the ones who knew exactly where to trust it and where not to. That only comes from having done the work the hard way first.

Your clients can’t articulate what they’re missing yet, but they will right after something goes wrong. The question is whether you’re the one they call to fix it, or the one who caused it.