The short answer
A company is ready to hire an AI consultant when skilled staff spend hours on reading, typing and checking; when management reports arrive late; when enquiries go unanswered out of hours; or when employees have started using public AI tools on company documents without any rule in place. Any one of these is enough to justify a first conversation.
- Repetitive document work done by qualified people
- Reports that take days to assemble
- Enquiries missed outside office hours
- Unmanaged use of public AI tools by staff
The six signs
You do not need all six.
- Qualified people spend a large part of the week reading, re-typing or checking documents
- The monthly management report takes days to assemble from several departments
- Customer or patient enquiries wait until the next morning, or are lost
- The same question is answered again and again by your most experienced staff
- Staff are pasting company or client material into public AI tools
- The board has asked what the company is doing about AI, and there is no written answer
What a consultant does first
The first step is a conversation about the company and the job you most want to change. From that comes a written scope. Nothing is built until you have agreed what is being built and why.
When to wait
If a process is still changing every month, fix the process first. If nobody inside the company can be named as the owner of the result, appoint that person before you start. A consultant who tells you to wait is doing the job properly.