6 March 2026

In our second TCG HiveMind chat, we share our thoughts on where the human value still shines brightly in environmental consulting…

A chaotic world….

Whilst this article was being drafted and reviewed (by humans!), we saw yet more brutal weather bombs and actual bombs hit parts of our troubled globe. Disaster and conflict events and the loss of power and connectivity they bring are a stark reminder that when electricity and networks go dark, so too do our digital work ecosystems. Our AI helpers go offline and the analogue skills of our human ecosystems are front and centre again.

Which brings us to our topic… what can human consultants do that AI still can't touch?

Hive-minding the digital mind:

Your feeds, like ours, will be beefed up with endless ‘slopaganda’ and shitey content spat out by some shat-bot. Each day we seem to sink further into a vast abyss of AI-generated gloop and ‘just-good-enough’ content. Where is the real!?

The AI landscape is re-crafting itself so fast that we humans are struggling to keep up. HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer argues in his recent thinkpiece Something Big is Happening, that we’re wallowing in the lull before a massive, no-going-back, tectonic shift in how the world functions, before a giant wave of disruption hits our workplace shores. He writes, “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing.”

It’s a sobering read, punctuated with lines like “The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have.”

There’s a name for it too - FOBO - the Cambridge Dictionary #newword blog defining it as, “the‘fear of becoming obsolete”’ a worried feeling that you may lose your job because your role can be done by AI.”

So, thinking about tech disruption alongside the chaos, change and complexity going on in other spheres – politics, regulation, environmental planning – we felt it was time to reflect, to celebrate and centre the human-ness that’s still needed in consulting to navigate looking after te taiao and support environmental planning processes.

Shumer's AI-outsourced coding work and our environmental consulting work have something in common: the crucial parts aren't the dull but necessary technical outputs – the number crunching and the reports; they're the messy, human, contextual bits that determine whether those outputs actually mean something and work in the real world.

What should we contract out to the AI and what is best done in the human realm? Let’s hear a few thoughts from the humans of TCG (it will be interesting to revisit this topic in a year and see how our reflections have changed).

As the ‘bag of mostly water’ behind the keyboard – I’ll start…

The writer’s viewpoint:

I’m a life-long word wrangler, and the AI of a year ago seemed a thing to be feared.  Was it time to pivot? Unlike me, it‘s swallowed every bit of text ever written… and knows all the grammar rules and… it can fake it better than all the humans I know! As my use of it has matured (along with the tech behind it), I’ve embraced it as the useful tool it can be– calling on it to act as a reviewer, editor, brainstormer and proofer of my work as needed.

Some call their AI setup their ‘mini-me’, but I find mine rather beige to work with.  I can’t quite hand over my whole soul to it (yet). I don’t get that warm, organic, connecting buzz of working alongside and problem solving with fellow humans. I also feel my creative brain fires differently when using it: it seems to put a muffler on my imagination, and it’s harder to get into that productive ‘flow zone’ where the good stuff gets done.

The messy, the organic bits, the murky but creative edges of ideas – that’s what matters to me. As one of my favourite commentators, Gaping Void, likes to say, “Human beings were designed to live in colour, not beige.”

What about my expert colleagues? Where do they collectively see the real value, the magic of the humans of TCG, as still having the edge?

1) When accuracy at every level is what you pay for…

We use AI strategically - for first drafts, research synthesis, and routine analysis. But for us AI outputs are just starting points, never final products. It’s the humans of TCG who have the final say, our responses crafted from decades of courtroom, council chamber and wānanga experience. Experience in messy, human situations that gives us the judgement to separate sound professional advice from confident-sounding nonsense.

AI can be brilliant at showing us it “…knows some stuff and is really good at bullshitting the rest… it makes assumptions and fills gaps with great confidence and it never says it doesn't know anything (unless pushed).”

We’ve learned this the hard way. There’s nothing like finding yourself arguing with ChatGPT after it throws up some glitchy shite, “I went - this is bullshit’ and it goes, ‘Oh sorry, here’s the right answer.’ Then I go, ‘Oh no, but that's wrong too.’ And it just said sorry again… eventually I realized I’m arguing with a machine that seems to have no idea what it doesn't know."

2)        When indigenous knowledge, mātauranga Māori and cultural competency are crucial to a project’s success…

From a tangata whenua standpoint, AI-generated material, is “quite specialised in western knowledge” mining it from published, online and written sources leaving out other forms of knowledge, like mātauranga Māori, that are at the heart of good environmental decision making. We’ve seen it produce stuff that’s generic, prone to a colonial bias, and doesn’t capture the localised nuances, political context and tikanga of kaupapa Māori,  “AI is great as a partner, but not a replacement for what it is that we do. Accountability and judgment will always sit with us [as hapū].”

AI isn’t and can’t be the nanny who looks at a rongoā plant and says, “Don’t pick from that one, it’s got the wrong vibe.” or “Don’t plant your mara, your kai on this tide” – connecting up patterns and ancient knowledge that AI can’t see, because that knowledge lives in whakapapa, and place and lived practice - not scanned texts.

AI can’t provide guidance on indigenous environmental decision‑making or te ao Māori perspectives, “ …the concept of mātauranga Māori is applied knowledge in a local context, and AI risks mixing up the local with the more generic mātauranga, giving output that doesn’t fit to a specific place and whakapapa.”

This is the sort of place-based, relational work that our TCG kaupapa taiao experts do that AI can't replicate.

3)        When you need complex, place‑based and relational work done …

“So much of our environmental work is about relationships and place, understanding people's perspective, divergent perspectives, and taking people along for the ride… that's something an actual human is needed for. I don't think any AI bot could possibly kind of navigate that journey.”

Our ecologists have experienced how AI can be a whizz at identifying plants and birds from a purely technical perspective, but you still need to temper that with a skilled human who can spot misidentifications.  Say you show a plant specimen to your smartphone app.  It identifies it as a mainland species, but as an ecologist with experience of island environments, you know it’s actually a plant only found on the Chatham Islands (true story!).  

AI can’t fully replace a human scientist who’s in-place to observe and understand a species, its behaviour, and subtle environmental cues. The sort of thing when you need to use, “pitfall traps for lizards to actually understand what's living there…that’s not something that an AI or computer can do.”

Or will it be able to in the future? Our curiosity was peaked with the announcement of Rentahuman.ai. This new take on how machines can interact with our ā-tīnana realm, is a website where AI agents can rent humans to do work for them in the real world – stuff like making deliveries, taking photos, field work, identity verification, and who knows what else!

But even if AI can 'rent humans' for field tasks, it still can't rent the interpretive expertise that turns those field observations into sometime meaningful and tailored to the resource issue at hand.

4)        When you need good judgement to lead out…

“…it's the black box of judgment where AI misses out… there's also the emotional intelligence - the understanding of what your clients’ needs are… especially as a planner, you're always weighing up multiple perspectives.”

AI is great with a well-prompted brief but it’s the humans who have the edge on reading a court/meeting room, using instinct, the ‘vibe’ (to quote The Castle),  and experience to know the subtle cues at work,  “…AI doesn’t see the full context of the wider landscape at work, just the paddock, the bit you've given it to look at.”

Accepting accountability, employing good judgment, making intuitive leaps, using emotional intelligence, and reading the politics at work / clients’ needs in a roomful of upset submitters and warring developers is still very much the domain of a skilful human planning consultant.

But not all our team was aligned here. Greg, our founder and always curious, couldn’t resist a challenge, “I wonder why there's such incredible confidence in our [human] judgment and decision making when there's so much evidence that it's not that flash.  I think we spend a lot of time looking at the failings of AI and machine learning, and we don't spend much time looking at our own failings!”

He queried how much faster would AI doing ‘a first cut’ on the issues get us to the critical conversation at the heart of a planning project?  He’d rather, “Spend my time in those sorts of conversations than years sitting doing that kind of deadly dull stuff to filter down to the real nub of a problem.”

 To sum up … the consultants win (of course we’d say that!)

Yep. We consultants still have the edge in the messy, political, relational human spaces where judgement, timing, and “the vibe” matter more than words on a page. We humans are valuable, precisely because we too are ‘messy’ and embedded in the social networks where most of our environmental decisions are made.

AI as we use it now is great at drudge work, synthesis, and speed, but weak on the sorts of situations and projects that need experienced rent-a-humans who can:

• read context and do relational work

• apply mātauranga Māori and place‑based knowledge with a feel for the politics at work (and the regional variations in taiao)

• use good judgment and apply creative, original thought to solve a complex problem

• take in-the-field measurements of real living things in te taiao!

It’s these ‘messy bits’ that actually move people opinions and support good decisions.

That's what you're paying for!  A colourful kete of human knowledge that comes from decades of working in the messy margins and the sharp edges of ideas.  Hard-won experience navigating the awkward bits – the informal conversations, the stakeholder tensions, the political dynamics, the cultural protocols, the relationship capital that determines whether a technically-sound project actually happens.

That’s TCG and our Hive Mind (of awesome humans).

The TCG HiveMind Lab Experiment:

Got a project that needs more than technical reports? Need consultants who can navigate the awkward conversations, read the political landscape, and get stakeholders actually aligned? We've spent decades in the messy spaces where projects either succeed or stall—and we know the difference.

Let our human Hive Mind help. The Catalyst Group specialises in working in technical, hearing environments with heart and head - bringing people together around the table to tackle real-world environmental problems with a serious commitment to crafting solutions that protect what matters now.

Get in touch and let’s chat about how together we can make a difference.