The slopshop - now open for business
How to spot a business that was generated, not built ... and why the human bit is the only bit left.
I recently received a LinkedIn message from a woman who wanted to sell me strategic advisory services. Her firm had a forgettable name, and she obviously hadn't clicked on my profile - if she had, she'd have seen she was pitching advisory services to someone who runs an advisory firm. Her website, when I clicked through, was a masterpiece of saying nothing across way too many words and one nondescript hero image.
“We partner with forward-thinking organisations to unlock transformative value at the intersection of strategy and execution.”
Reader, I have read that sentence approximately nine thousand times this month, and I have never once understood what it means. But this instance was different. It had the specific, uncanny sheen of a thing that no human being wrote, priced, or thought about for longer than the ninety seconds it took to type “make me an advisory firm” into ChatGPT.
Welcome to the slopshop.
A slopshop is a business that has been generated entirely from AI. The website looks like it was whacked together, because it was. The service offering is a smooth copy paste of every service offering that has ever existed, because that’s exactly what it is: the statistical average of ten thousand real firms, spun into something that has the shape of a company without any of the hard bits. It has a logo. It has “pillars.” It has a founder who is very excited to be “reimagining” an industry they entered eleven days ago. What they rarely have is anyone who has done the thing they are charging you to do - or not in this form, anyway.
And they are multiplying. I cannot open LinkedIn without seeing another one.
Why it’s always an ‘advisory’.
It’s not an accident that the slopshop almost always seems to be an advisory firm, or a consultancy, or a “strategic partner.” You don’t see many AI-generated plumbers. You do not see a flood of generated dentists, or generated hairdressers, or generated people who install your hot water system. Those trades share a common feature: the work is real, and if you get it wrong, water comes through the ceiling… or you end up with an accidental bowl cut.
Advisory work has no ceiling. That is the entire appeal. It’s the one industry whose deliverable has always been just vague enough and slightly hard to distinguish from confident language arranged in a pleasing order. True advisors have spent decades training clients to accept the deck, the framework - the idea - as evidence that value has been delivered. The advisory industry, in other words, spent years lovingly building the exact runway that generative AI needed to land on.
There’s a lower barrier now, too, and it’s worth being honest about it. Starting a “firm” used to require at least the friction of building a website, writing your own service list, and finding someone to design a logo - small tasks, but each one a tiny checkpoint where a person had to decide they were serious. You can now go from idea to incorporated-looking entity between two coffees. Most of what’s being generated is not fraud but just frictionless ambition with nothing underneath it yet. While I’m not one to knock someone that’s having a genuine go, where do we draw the line?
The easy bit, and everything else.
It would be very easy to read all of this as a grumble about AI, and it isn’t one. I use these tools constantly. We all do. They are genuinely good at what they do. Hell, this article was even part edited with the help of my good friend Claude. But what AI does well is the simple bit. Building a slick website. Writing a punchy launch post. Generating a logo, drafting a mission statement, spinning up a colour palette, mocking up a pitch deck, producing a headshot that makes you look like you own a Hugo Boss suits.
None of it is the actual business.
The business is the part no machine has ever done for anyone. It’s cold calling. It’s finding a client who has never heard of you and giving them a reason to want to trust you. Getting the meeting. Having the meeting cancelled. Rescheduling the meeting (once, twice, maybe three times). Finally turning up to the rescheduled meeting having actually thought about them and their problem and not about yourself. Selling yourself to a stranger with no track record to point at. Handling the silence after you send the proposal. Pricing the work so that you neither go broke nor scare them off. Writing the scope, then the revised scope, then the third scope after they changed their mind. Working out a budget that meets reality. Reading the room when the brief shifts halfway through and nobody says so. Having the conversation that the budget will need to change. Having that new budget rejected. Pricing the project lower. Delivering the thing, on time, in the exact shape this exact client needs, in the week their world caught fire for unrelated reasons. Chasing the invoice. Chasing the invoice again. Managing the anxious person on their side whose job is riding on your work. Knowing when to push and when to shut up. Telling them the answer they didn’t pay to hear. Being wrong sometimes, in front of them, and staying on the line anyway. Following up six months later because you genuinely wanted to know how it turned out - and if there’s an opportunity to work together again. And then doing all of it again for the next client. And the one after that. Until unglamorously, and so painstakingly slowly, you have the thing a slopshop can never generate: the muscle memory of a a job that went sideways and came good anyway.
The slopshop has done the first bit but none of the second, which is to say it has done nothing at all. It's a shopfront with no shop behind it - just an ‘open’ sign.
The tell.
The scary thing is that slop is often quite polished, and indistinguishable. We were promised that AI mediocrity would look like mediocrity - clumsy, obviously wrong. Instead it has good grammar and clean margins and a colour palette drawn from a tasteful Pinterest board. The tell is not that it’s bad. The tell is that it’s about nothing and no one.
Read a slopshop’s proposal closely and you will notice it never once refers to a specific client, a specific problem, a specific mistake anyone learned from, a specific opinion anyone might disagree with. It cannot, because there is no one behind it who has been in a room where it went wrong. It’s the corporate equivalent of someone describing a country they’ve only seen on a postcard, in perfect grammar, at great length.
And once you learn to see it, you see it everywhere, which is genuinely unsettling (but also empowering).
What’s actually left to sell?
So, If a machine can generate a plausible advisory firm in an afternoon, what exactly is a real one now worth?
The answer, I’ve become convinced, is the part that was never on the website to begin with.
It’s the call where someone who’s done the work tells you what you’d rather not hear. It’s knowing which of your problems is the real one, and which is the one you keep raising because it’s the easier one to talk about. It’s a name on the work, someone still there when it goes sideways, who can’t just delete the firm and spin up a new one. It’s the person who remembers where things stood last year and asks, unprompted, about the thing that was keeping you up.
None of this scales, and in a slopshop world that’s the whole moat. The machine can generate infinite plausible strangers; it can’t generate one person who actually knows you and is actually on the hook. Trust was always the product in advisory work. We just let firms disguise it as decks for so long that we forgot. The slop has done us the accidental favour of stripping the disguise off.
Honestly, I hope the slopshops make it, for the sake of the industry - and my sanity. But a slopshop that succeeds is a slopshop in name only. It’s one that that went and found the clients, did the work, earned the trust. Do all that and you’re not slop anymore. You’re a real firm!
But I suspect we’re heading somewhere slightly old-fashioned. As the generated stuff floods our LinkedIn feeds, the real things that will come to matter are the deeply analogue ones: who introduced you, whose name they’ll go back to, whether they’ll stay back late and have a drink and download with you, whether there’s a human who feels the weight of your outcome as something more than a line item. The premium won’t be on information - the machine has commoditised that. The premium will be on someone giving a damn, in person, with something to lose.
A slopshop can generate a company. It cannot generate a person. And it turns out that a person - a real one, who knows your name and answers the phone - was what we were paying for all along.
We just needed the slop to remind us.
Julianna Burgess is an executive at pre-slop advisory shop, General Strategic.