There is a line item that never shows up in a consulting firm's pricing, and it is one of the most expensive things the firm does: checking its own work. Before a deck goes to a client, a senior person red-teams it. They walk the footnotes, re-verify the metrics, re-run the calculations, and hunt for the one number that does not hold up. Because nothing destroys a firm's credibility faster than a client catching an unverified figure, or worse a hallucinated one, in a board meeting.
That review is real protection. It is also a quiet margin killer. The most expensive people in the firm spend hours doing reconciliation, and even then it is not airtight, because manual checking misses things.
Why generic AI made this worse, not better
The obvious move is to point a chatbot at the research and move faster. The problem is that generic AI made the footnote tax worse. It produces fluent, confident, plausible text, and you cannot tell which claims are grounded and which are invented. So the review does not shrink. It grows, because now every line is suspect and nothing carries a source you can trust.
That is the trap: the tool that was supposed to remove the verification burden quietly increased it.
Make the output check itself
Bricolage is built the other way around. Verification is not a step you bolt on after the research. It is built into how the research is produced. Every claim is linked to the source it came from, and you can click from a sentence in the deliverable to the exact source that supports it. Where a claim cannot be grounded in a real source, the system says so rather than inventing one.
Then the whole run is sealed with a cryptographically signed audit receipt. Change a single entry and the signature no longer verifies, which means the record is not merely claimed to be accurate, it is checkable, by you, by your client, or by a regulator, against a key they only have to trust once.
What the review becomes
The red-team does not disappear. Senior judgment still belongs in the loop. But it stops being a manual reconciliation of every footnote and becomes a review of the reasoning, because the sourcing is already done and already traceable. The hours that went into confirming the numbers were real go back into the work the client is actually paying for.
The footnote tax is one of those costs that is invisible until you measure it, and then it is everywhere. The way to lower it is not to check faster. It is to produce work that arrives already checkable.