Answers to the questions I hear most often -- about pricing, timelines, what the 2-week audit includes, and when to DIY vs bring in an advisor.
It's a short, structured engagement where an outside operator looks at your business, finds the two or three workflows where AI will save the most time per dollar, picks the tools, writes the prompts, and gets one of them working before they leave. No 80-page strategy deck. No consulting dependency. You end with one working workflow and a plan for the next three.
Four phases: diagnose (map your workflows), design (pick the tool and write the prompts), guide (run it alongside the old process until it holds up), review (measure the outcome and pick the next workflow). One workflow per 90 days is a realistic pace for a small team. Two workflows in 90 days is excellent.
Interviews with 3-5 key people, a map of current processes, a list of 10-15 AI opportunities scored by hours-saved-per-week and setup effort, a recommended first pilot, and a 90-day action plan. All in two weeks. It's a working document for your team, not a consulting deck.
Hourly advisors: $150-$400/hour. Fixed-fee 2-week AI assessment: $3,000-$8,000. Ongoing retainers after an assessment: $2,000-$6,000/month. Enterprise 'AI transformation' firms start at $100K and don't fit small businesses. If a consultant won't give you a rough price in the first call, walk away.
DIY if: 1-5 people, one painful workflow, one motivated person on the team, and a weekend to experiment. Hire an advisor if: 10+ people, AI has become 'everyone's job' and nothing sticks, three prior attempts bounced off, or you need an outside voice to tell the team what to stop doing. A good $5K advisor usually pays for themselves in the first month.
One production-ready workflow: 2-4 weeks from decision to live. Two workflows in 90 days: realistic first-quarter plan. A full team-wide shift to AI-assisted workflows: 6-12 months, but that's a culture change, not a project.
AI consulting is the outside advisor who decides what to do and in what order. AI implementation is the hands-on work of configuring the tool, writing the prompts, and getting it into production. A good engagement includes both: the consultant decides what, then personally implements one pilot by the end of two weeks and hands the rest to the team.
Yes, and it's usually the fastest win for a small business. AI marketing consulting works on your content process, email campaigns, lead research, competitive analysis, and first-draft ad copy. In two weeks you can stand up one or two automations that save a marketing team 5-10 hours a week.
If you're under 5 people with one painful workflow, no -- go straight to a pilot. If you're 10+ people, a few prior AI attempts have failed, and you can't decide what to tackle first, then yes. A good AI strategy isn't an 80-page deck -- it's a two-page list of what to do, in what order, and at what budget. Everything else is slides.
Yes. I work with founders and teams in the US, EU, and Ukraine. Everything runs remotely over video and async docs. I work in both English and Ukrainian. Time zones under a 6-hour difference are easiest to schedule.
It's normal and it's not your fault. Resistance disappears the moment one person shows real time savings on a real task. That's why the first pilot is always a boring, repetitive workflow -- not something ambitious. Once the team sees that the marketing lead now writes the weekly report in 15 minutes instead of 2 hours, resistance ends within a week.