Often you need only what an AI consultant sells first: a written assessment, built from your own records, of what is worth doing in your business, what each change would cost and what it would produce. You need someone to do the work as well when several programs disagree with each other and the work is nobody's job. Before you decide who to hire, decide what has to be inside that document.
Search for an AI consultant, an AI advisor or an AI implementation consultant and you get three names for overlapping work. The first deliverable is almost always the same. It is an assessment, sold as a paid engagement and priced in the thousands. We give that document away. We call it a Business Analysis. This guide is the reason why, and what to look for if you take it somewhere else.
What you are buying at the start is a document.
Somebody talks to you, looks at how your business runs, and writes down what they think you should do next. What varies is how much of your actual business gets into it.
A good one changes what you do on Monday. A weak one is a tour of tools that already exist, reformatted around your industry.
Here is the test. Open the document and look for a number that came out of your business. If every figure in it is an industry average, nobody read your records.
The step that decides whether any of it is worth reading.
Somebody has to read your business's own history: appointments, cancellations, invoices, customer records, whatever your software has been collecting while you were working. It is rarely tidy. It is usually more revealing than anything said in the room.
At an acupuncture practice we read seven years of appointment history before any conversation about software. At a chiropractic practice the review came before a move to new software, and the finding was that the complaint and the cause were two different things.
Three answers a real review can reach.
Three answers. The third is the reason to trust the other two.
Work that runs on somebody remembering can be handed over.
The setup was never finished. Adding AI on top would automate the mess.
The timing is wrong, or the volume is too low for the work to pay back.
An assessment that can reach only one conclusion is a quotation with extra pages.
AI advisor, AI consultant, AI implementation consultant: what each one hands you.
| Title | What it sells | Where the work stops |
|---|---|---|
| AI advisor | Judgement, by the hour or on a retainer | Nothing gets built. |
| AI consultant | An assessment | The engagement ends when the document does. |
| AI implementation consultant | The build | Usually when the last piece goes live. |
The question that sorts them is who answers at seven in the morning when something stops. Whoever built the work is the only one who can repair it.
What an AI consultant for a small business costs.
The assessment is usually a paid engagement priced in the thousands, and the build is quoted after it. We do it differently. The first Business Analysis is free and yours to keep. If you want us to do the work, it is $500 a month with no contract. We build what the analysis recommends, keep it running, send a report every Monday, and run the analysis again every three months.
When the document is enough, and when it is not.
The document is probably enough when you have one program that mostly works, a short list of changes, and somebody in the business who enjoys this kind of thing. Take it, do it in the order it recommends, and call someone if a step stalls. We will say so in the document.
You need someone to do the work when several programs disagree with each other, work has to keep running while things change underneath it, and it is nobody's job.