Let me be honest with you about something most AI consultants won’t say out loud: a lot of what passes for “AI consulting” in 2026 is someone with a ChatGPT subscription and a Canva logo charging you $500 an hour to tell you to use ChatGPT.
That’s not what I do. But since you’re here, you probably want a straight answer to the question: what does an AI consultant do, really? Here’s an honest look at what the actual work involves — what it looks like on a Tuesday afternoon, what a consultant is qualified to touch, and whether the price tag makes any sense for your business.
Let’s get into it.
The honest job description
An AI consultant helps organizations figure out where artificial intelligence can create real, measurable value — and then helps them actually get there. That sounds broad because it is. But here’s what it looks like in practice, for the kinds of businesses I work with.
The first thing I usually do with a new client isn’t recommend a tool. It’s map their workflows. Where are your people spending time on things that shouldn’t require human judgment? Where is information getting stuck because it has to go through one person’s inbox? Where are you making decisions based on data you technically have but can’t actually see fast enough to act on?
AI is most useful at the seams of your operation — the repetitive hand-offs, the slow summaries, the reports nobody reads because they take three hours to compile. That’s where I spend most of my time looking.
After that, depending on what I find, the work might look like any of the following:
- Scoping and building a custom AI workflow using tools you already pay for (most businesses are paying for AI capabilities they’ve never turned on)
- Evaluating and selecting vendors for a specific use case — whether that’s document processing, customer service, internal search, or something else
- Writing the actual prompts and instructions that make AI tools perform consistently, not just impressively during the demo
- Helping your team understand how to work alongside AI tools without either ignoring them entirely or trusting them too much
- Sitting in on decisions as a fractional advisor when your leadership needs someone who can speak both the business language and the technical language in the same meeting
Notice what’s not on that list: I don’t build large language models. I don’t train your own custom AI from scratch. For the vast majority of businesses — including large ones — that’s not the right answer and not a good use of money. What I do is help you use what already exists, intelligently.
Who actually needs an AI consultant right now
Short answer: not everyone. And I’d rather tell you that upfront than take a project that isn’t going to generate real ROI for you.
The businesses I can help the most tend to share a few characteristics. They have operational bottlenecks that are clearly costing them time or money — they just haven’t had the bandwidth or the expertise to address them. They’re curious about AI but appropriately skeptical — they’re not trying to add “AI-powered” to their website, they want to actually use it to do something better. And they have at least one person inside the business who can own the implementation once I hand it off.
I work primarily with small and mid-sized businesses in the Midwest, though that’s a geography of mindset more than a zip code. The businesses I work best with are the ones that want clear answers, measurable outcomes, and a realistic conversation about what AI can and can’t do for them in the next six months.
If you’re looking for someone to present your board with a 40-slide AI transformation roadmap, I’m probably not your person. If you want someone to sit down, map your business, and tell you honestly whether you should be spending $20,000 on AI this year or $2,000 — and then actually help you do it — that’s what I’m here for.
What it costs to hire an AI consultant in 2026
Pricing in this space is all over the place, so let me give you real numbers — mine — and enough context to use them as a benchmark even if you’re comparing against other consultants.
The most common entry point for ongoing advisory work is somewhere between $1,000 and $2,500 per month for a retainer arrangement. On the lower end, that typically gets you a few hours a month of advisory access, async support, and someone who’s paying attention to your AI environment on a rolling basis. On the higher end, you’re getting more active involvement — attending meetings, reviewing proposals, helping scope and manage projects.
My retainer tiers specifically run from $995/month for foundational advisory up to $2,500/month for fractional AI leadership, which is essentially a part-time Chief AI Officer role for businesses that need that level of strategic input but aren’t ready to hire a full-time executive to do it.
For project work, a focused AI opportunity audit — where I map your business and come back with a prioritized set of AI recommendations — starts at $3,500. An automation build project where I’m actually configuring and deploying a workflow for you starts at $3,950. Larger implementation partnerships that involve custom integrations, vendor coordination, and extended build work start at $8,500 and can run significantly higher depending on scope.
Hourly advisory work, for situations where you just need someone to answer specific questions or review a proposal, runs $195/hour.
One thing worth knowing: my pricing is going up over time, not down. I’m early in building my consulting practice, and the clients I bring on now are coming in at the lowest rates I’ll ever offer. That’s not a sales tactic — it’s just the economics of how this works. If you want the full picture on services and pricing, I lay it all out on my services page.
What separates a good AI consultant from a bad one
Since I’m asking you to trust me with real money and real business decisions, it’s fair to give you some criteria to evaluate me — or anyone else you might hire.
The first thing I’d look for is intellectual honesty about limitations. AI is genuinely powerful and genuinely overhyped at the same time. A consultant who can’t tell you what the tools won’t do — hallucination risks, data privacy concerns, cases where automation creates more fragility than it solves — is someone who’s selling you something, not advising you.
The second thing I’d look for is real implementation experience, not just familiarity with the landscape. Anyone can read the same newsletters and watch the same YouTube videos you can. What’s harder to fake is having actually built workflows, debugged integrations, and watched implementations succeed or fail in the real world. Ask for specifics. Ask for what broke and why.
Third: ask who they’ve worked with that’s similar to you. AI consulting for a 15-person professional services firm in Springfield is a different job than AI consulting for a 200-person e-commerce company. The tools often overlap but the judgment calls don’t.
And finally — does this person talk to you like a business owner or like someone who wants to impress you with terminology? The second kind might know more than the first. But the first kind will actually get things done inside your organization.
A note on timing
The businesses that are going to look smart about AI in 2028 are not the ones waiting for the dust to settle. The dust is never going to fully settle. They’re the businesses that made a few well-chosen moves in 2025 and 2026, built some internal capability, and now have a foundation to iterate on.
I’m not saying that to manufacture urgency. I’m saying it because it’s what the evidence suggests, and because I think a lot of otherwise sharp business owners are underestimating how much institutional knowledge gets built by just starting — even imperfectly.
If you want to talk through whether your business is in a position to make good use of AI consulting right now, I do short discovery calls at no charge. You can find a time on my consulting page, or just reach out directly.
I’ll give you a straight answer either way.
