AI consultant for small business: what it delivers, what it costs and what to look for

What an AI consultant does for a smaller business

In smaller companies, AI is rarely about anything spectacular. It is about the work that comes back every day: orders retyped out of email, purchase invoices matched by hand, customer questions that get the same answer every time. An AI consultant decides where technology takes that over and where it stays a human job.

A good consultant starts with your process, not with a tool. In an installation company the gain often sits in the administrative tail after the job; in a wholesaler in purchase invoices; in an accountancy firm in chasing clients for documents. Know the process and you automate what pays back most, not what is easiest.

• Working out where manual work costs the most hours and mistakes the most money
• Judging whether your data and systems are good enough to build on
• Naming, per opportunity, what it returns, what it costs and what you must arrange
• Setting an order, so you start with one thing instead of five
• Saying what to leave alone, or where a standard package beats custom software

Advice and delivery: why splitting them often costs more

The classic route is an adviser first, a builder second. Tidy on paper. In practice there is a handover between the two, and that is where it goes wrong. The adviser describes what needs to happen in the language of your business; the builder reads it and has to guess what was meant. Every question that comes up during the build — dozens of them — is answered by someone who was not in the room.

You pay for that twice. Once because the builder redoes the discovery the adviser already did. And once because advice written without knowing how it will be built tends to describe a more expensive solution than you needed. Someone who never builds never finds out that an integration that is one line on paper is three weeks of work.

And nobody on your side guards the advice. A large company has a programme manager on it for a year; a twenty-person business has a director with two hours a week. Hence the drawer.

When you do want advice only

Sometimes an adviser who builds nothing is the cleanest thing you can buy: wherever the judgement itself is the product. Ask a building agency for it and you will probably get sound advice, but you cannot prove it was independent. That becomes a problem as soon as a bank or a contracting authority has to assess your reasoning.

We say so when people call us for it. It costs us the work, but it saves you an argument later on.

• You need to justify an investment to a bank, investor or shareholders
• You are in a tender or grant process where independence is formally required
• You have two quotes and want a verdict from someone who is neither
• There is internal disagreement about direction and you need a neutral voice

What an AI consultant costs

Advice is almost always billed by the hour or by the half-day. We do not know other firms’ rates precisely enough to quote them, so we will state ours and let you compare.

Looking at the work on your shop floor costs €149 per hour. A half-day of four hours is €596 excluding VAT, plus travel; a full day is €1,192. The core report is included, and it is yours — even if you carry on with someone else. Building is separate: €110 per hour for straightforward work, €165 for complex development, monthly in advance from a build budget you can stop at any time.

Where does the money go? Not into slides. Most of it goes into working out how the work really runs — almost never what the manual says — and into testing against real cases from your own records.

• Free AI scan: five minutes online, a score and a first price indication
• Core session on site: €149 per hour, half-day €596, full day €1,192 (excl. VAT and travel)
• Core report with priorities and a go or no-go per opportunity: included
• Building: €110 per hour for straightforward work, €165 for complex development
• Professional indemnity and public liability insurance; a grant partner checks as standard

How the process works

Below is the route as we run it. Another firm will use a different shape, but the questions stay the same: what is the problem, what is it worth, and when do we stop.

1. 01Fill in the free AI scan: five minutes, questions that adapt to your sector.
2. 02Intro call: is it worth us coming out? If not, we say so here.
3. 03Core session on your shop floor, a half-day. We walk along, talk to the people doing the work and look inside the systems.
4. 04Core report: priorities, expected return, integrations needed, and a go or no-go per opportunity.
5. 05Decide: stop with the report in hand, or carry on with the same people.
6. 06Build in small pieces: one process first, live with a few users, measure, then extend.
7. 07Hand over: documentation, access and an explanation, so you are not locked in.

Independent, small agency or large consultancy

An independent AI consultant is usually keenest on price and you get the person you spoke to. The downside: one set of experiences, and rarely the capacity to build a larger system and maintain it for years.

A small agency — what we are — sits in between: you speak to the people doing the work, and there is capacity to build and maintain. The drawback is named above: whoever advises earns from the delivery. Ask when they last advised somebody not to build.

A large consultancy can take on more and carries a name that makes life easier inside a board. For a forty-person manufacturer that is usually hard to justify. Check who will actually be at your table: not always the people from the proposal.

What to look for: the questions and the red flags

The key question is not the hourly rate, it is where the ceiling is. Open-ended hours are more dangerous in AI work, because you rarely know up front exactly what is needed. Anyone who will not attach a cap, a range or an interim decision point is handing that risk to you.

Also ask for a project that went wrong and what they changed. Anyone without an answer has built too little.

• Red flag: an hourly rate with no cap, no range and no point at which you can stop
• Red flag: no explicit go/no-go, so “do not build this” can never win
• Red flag: the deliverable is slides and a roadmap with no price tags
• Red flag: after two conversations they already know which product you need
• Red flag: you only speak to an account manager, never to whoever builds it
• Ask: who owns the code, data and documentation afterwards, and is that in writing?
• Ask: does it run on standard technology someone else could take over?

What you have to bring yourself

An AI consultant can do nothing without access to how the work really runs. That predicts success better than the budget: are you willing to free up a few hours from the people doing the work?

It does not have to be tidy. We would rather have a messy folder of real invoices than a polished sample file, because that mess has to pass through it later. What you do need is one person who can settle things.

• A few hours from the people who run the process daily, not just from management
• Access, or read rights, in the systems where the work sits now
• Real examples: twenty actual invoices or orders say more than a process description
• One decision-maker who does not need three weeks of internal consultation
• Clarity on what may be done with customer data — GDPR also depends on your own agreements

When not to hire an AI consultant yet

The clearest case: your basics are not in order. If your data is scattered across spreadsheets, mail folders and people’s heads, there is nothing to build on. That is not an AI problem, and an AI consultant is an expensive fix for it.

Mid-way through a system change, wait: anything you build on the old package gets thrown away. And if nobody can free up three hours a week to look, test and decide, it will not work — paying more does not change that.

The most honest one: if the manual work costs you no customers, no mistakes and no staff, there is no problem to solve. Call when that changes.

• Your data sits nowhere structured and there is no start of order
• You are switching to a different core system within six months
• Nobody on your side has time to look at it and decide
• You actually want a chatbot because everyone has one — not a business problem

Frequently asked questions

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Want to know whether it pays off for you?

Start with the free AI scan: five minutes, a score and a price indication. If there is a reason to come out, a half-day core session on your shop floor follows (€596 excl. VAT and travel), with a core report and a go or no-go per opportunity. If there is nothing there, we will tell you.