A CFO rang me yesterday asking if she should hire an AI consultant for her company. My answer: probably not yet.

This isn’t a popular opinion in my line of work, but consultants—including AI specialists—aren’t always the answer. Sometimes they’re an expensive way to delay decisions you already know how to make.

When Consultants Add Real Value

External expertise makes sense when you genuinely don’t know what you don’t know. If your organisation has never touched machine learning, doesn’t have anyone who understands data pipelines, and needs to make a significant technology bet, then yes, bring in help.

Good AI consultants can accelerate your learning curve by months. They’ve seen what works and what doesn’t across multiple implementations. That pattern recognition is genuinely valuable.

They’re also useful when internal politics are blocking progress. Sometimes you need an outsider to say the obvious thing everyone’s been tiptoeing around.

When You’re Just Paying for Expensive Validation

Here’s the pattern I see too often: a company has already decided what they want to do with AI. They’ve picked the use case, maybe even selected a vendor. They hire a consultant to “validate the strategy.”

What they’re actually buying is permission. They want someone with credentials to tell them their decision was correct.

That’s not consulting. That’s therapy with a PowerPoint deck.

If you already know what you want to build and your team has the technical capability to build it, just build it. The consultant’s “strategic recommendations” won’t be materially different from what you already know.

The Readiness Question

Many businesses aren’t ready for AI implementation, regardless of how good their consultant is. If your data is scattered across spreadsheets, your processes aren’t documented, and different teams use completely different definitions for the same metrics, no consultant can fix that.

They can tell you it’s a problem. But you don’t need to pay consulting rates to hear that.

Fix the fundamentals first. Get your data infrastructure sorted. Document your processes. Then maybe bring in specialists for the actual AI implementation.

What to Ask Before Hiring

Before engaging any AI consultant, answer these honestly:

Do you have a specific problem to solve? “We need AI” isn’t a problem statement. “Our customer service response time is too slow and we want to automate tier-one support” is.

Do you have data relevant to that problem? AI needs inputs. If you don’t have historical data about the process you want to improve, there’s nothing for a consultant to work with.

Can you actually implement what they recommend? A beautiful strategy document is worthless if your IT team is already drowning and can’t take on another project for 18 months.

What’s your decision timeline? If the answer is “we’ll figure that out after the engagement,” you’re not ready for consulting. You’re ready for internal alignment work.

The Middle Ground

Some organisations benefit from targeted advisory work rather than full consulting engagements. A few hours with someone who knows the space to pressure-test your thinking. A technical review of your proposed architecture before you commit.

Firms like AI consultants Melbourne and others often offer lighter-touch engagements that make more sense for companies earlier in their journey. The hourly rate feels steep, but it’s cheaper than a six-month engagement that produces a strategy deck you never implement.

The Bottom Line

Consultants are tools. Like any tool, they’re useful for specific jobs and useless for others.

If you need external expertise because you genuinely lack it internally, bring in help. If you’re looking for someone to make decisions for you, that’s a leadership problem, not a consulting need.

The best AI implementations I’ve seen came from companies that used consultants surgically—for specific technical challenges or to fill genuine knowledge gaps—not as outsourced strategy departments.

Know what you need before you sign the engagement letter. And if what you need is just confidence to move forward with what you already know, save your money.