In 2025, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador paid $1.6 million to consulting firm Deloitte “to help address its health authority’s staffing crisis”. The “help” came in the form of a report containing analysis and recommendations for the provincial healthcare system. Given the importance of a functioning healthcare system, you would think a firm as prestigious as Deloitte would do everything in its power to produce accurate reporting. Instead, Deloitte committed blunders that would make an eight-grader blush. The report contains AI-generated citations “which don’t exist but were used to support claims related to virtual care, monetary recruitment and retention incentives, recruitment strategies, and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers”. This isn’t the first time Deloitte has pulled this. Just a month before the N.L. report was produced, Deloitte had to refund the Australian government for a report that also contained AI slop. Whether the N.L. government will get its money back remains to be seen but Deloitte apparently “firmly stands behind the recommendations put forward”! It may seem shocking that a firm paid hefty fees can produce such garbage and defend said garbage. But it fits a pattern we white-collar workers are familiar with: the boss wants to make a decision that will be unpopular with their workers or with the general public; instead of taking responsibility for it, the boss hires a consulting firm and pays extravagant sums to produce “recommendations”. Lo and behold, the “recommendations” say exactly what the boss wanted in the first place. Only the boss can now claim that their decisions are a product of “neutral” analysis by an “outside firm”. Deloitte is only supercharging this process with AI. Given the push towards austerity, we already know what Deloitte recommended: cuts, cuts and more cuts.
-Anonymous
