Is AI consulting worth it?
Only when it is tied to specific business outcomes instead of open-ended experiments. If you cannot say what success looks like before the engagement starts, you are paying for someone else to learn.
The math on AI consulting is simple. If a $10,000 engagement removes 10 hours per week of manual work, at a blended labour cost of $50 per hour, that is $26,000 per year in recovered time. Most engagements that are scoped well pay back within months.
Where it stops being worth it: when the consultant wants to run pilots without a clear picture of what gets deployed, when nobody internally owns the work after the consultant leaves, or when data quality is so poor that any AI output is unreliable.
A strong consultant will tell you when not to hire them. That is usually the signal you want to hire them.
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