India, Nov. 21 -- There's a moment every professional dreads: that instant you realise the work that once defined you can now be done by a machine - faster and more cheaply. For V Shrinath, the Bengaluru-based founder of Salient Advisory and a Google Startups mentor, that moment arrived last year. He had spent years straddling consulting and technology. He knew how these worlds operated, how firms sold expertise, how talent pipelines were built, and how carefully the illusion of craft is maintained.

But he was also watching AI evolve closely. He kept coming back to one question: when would AI (artificial intelligence) replicate the parts of his job he considered expertise? He broke his work down line by line - the kind of audit consultan...