Digital Me for Executives, Consultants, and Thought Leaders 

Bloor Research’s argument is deliberately narrow. This isn’t for everyone. It’s for people whose professional value is rooted in accumulated knowledge and judgement; the people whose output is limited by their own diary, not by demand for what they know. 

The population this applies to isn’t a niche. In the US alone, 5.6 million independent workers now earn six figures or more solo; nearly double the 3 million recorded in 2020, with millennials hitting peak earning years alongside pandemic-era independents who kept scaling. That’s a fast-growing group of consultants, subject matter experts, and founders whose entire income already depends on one thing: their own accumulated judgement, sold one hour or one engagement at a time. 

For that group, the constraint Bloor’s analysis names directly, decades of pattern recognition locked inside one person’s diary, isn’t an abstraction. It’s the ceiling on their income. A Consultant’s Digital Me℠ can deliver a methodology-led first cut before they ever enter the room; a Founder’s Digital Me℠ keeps functioning as the product’s credibility even if they exit, scale, or step back. 

For the Thought Leader persona specifically, the case is measurable rather than aspirational. It holds up across both halves of a B2B buying committee: the named executives a campaign is aimed at (“target decision-makers”) and the “hidden” decision-makers, buying-committee members without a formal title who still shape the purchase. 64% of hidden decision-makers and 65% of target decision-makers say they trust thought leadership more than marketing materials or product sheets when judging a company’s capabilities, and a similar share of each group – 64% of hidden decision-makers, 63% of target decision-makers, spend more than an hour a week actually reading or watching it. It also shows up at the point that decides deals: 79% of hidden decision-makers say they’re more likely to advocate for a vendor’s proposal during an RFP process when that vendor consistently produces high-quality thought leadership. 

The bottleneck isn’t whether thought leadership works. It’s whether one person can keep producing enough of it without it consuming every hour they have left for the work that pays. That’s precisely the gap Bloor’s argument points to: Digital Me℠ is built to amplify reach without consuming more of the person’s own time, not to replace their judgement. 

None of the six personas above get value from a generic chatbot with their name on it — they get value from a system built on their own structured methodology, opinions, and reasoning. That build process is the same regardless of which persona applies capturing your own expertise before you try to build your own AI come first, and the platform comes after. 

For the Subject Matter Expert in particular, this is the same constraint behind institutional knowledge walking out the door when someone leaves – deep, finite-supply expertise that was never structured into something that outlasts the person’s own calendar. 

And for the Founder or Consultant weighing this against just charging more hours: the same math that makes the Fusion Economy a different claim from ordinary productivity applies here too; a captured, owned asset compounds; billable hours don’t.

• MBO Partners — 2025 State of Independence in America — 5.6 million six-figure independents in 2025, up from 3 million in 2020. 
• Edelman & LinkedIn — 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report — trust, time-spent, and RFP-influence figures.