Services
AI strategy consulting
AI strategy consulting has a reputation problem: months of interviews, a hundred slides, and nothing anyone can act on. We sell the opposite, and it’s deliberately small.
What strategy means here
A strategy is a set of decisions with reasons attached. So the deliverable is a plan you can act on the week after we hand it over: use cases ranked by payoff and effort, build-versus-buy calls, a sequence, and the guardrails each step needs. No vision statements, no maturity pyramids. If a document doesn’t change what you do next quarter, it wasn’t strategy.
And because the people writing the plan are the people who’d build it, the plan can’t hide behind abstraction. We have to be able to live with it.
How the engagement works
It starts the same way all our work does: a fixed-scope assessment, 3–6 weeks, priced at $20,000 to $80,000 (where in that range depends on scope: how many systems and teams we assess, company size, and regulatory exposure). We look at your operation, your data, and your systems, then come back with the plan. If the honest answer is that you’re not ready to build yet, the plan says that too, with the fixes in order.
The buyer this fits is a leadership team at an established company, from a few hundred to tens of thousands of employees, that knows AI matters and doesn’t yet know where. From your side it takes a handful of interviews and access to the people who actually run the workflows. We’re careful with their time; they have jobs.
What you walk away with
- A ranked list of AI use cases by payoff and effort, including the ones we’d skip and why.
- Build-versus-buy decisions with the reasoning written down.
- A sequence your own team can run, with us or without us.
- The governance work each step needs, sized before it surprises you.
After the plan
Some firms sell this as AI transformation consulting. It’s the same work with a bigger word on the invoice. What matters after the plan is delivery, and there you have three options: your team runs it, we build it (see AI consulting services and AI automation), or we stay on in a leadership seat as a fractional chief AI officer. Ongoing advisory runs $5,000–$15,000 per month in published ranges, though retainers at that band cover a steady advisory seat; embedded fractional leadership across a large organization prices well above it.
Who writes the plan
Nick Major, the engineer, in Lisbon, and Isaac Major, the operator, in Salt Lake City. Nick builds AI systems in production; Isaac has run the kind of teams they land in. Full backgrounds are on the about page. We publish our prices, our process, and, in the rates guide, everyone else’s too.
Questions people ask
- What does an AI strategy consultant do?
- Turns “we should do something with AI” into decisions: which use cases, build or buy, in what order, with what guardrails. A good one also names the use cases to skip, in writing. The output should be a plan your own team can execute, not a document that needs its own consultant to interpret.
- How much does AI strategy consulting cost?
- Published 2026 rate guides put AI consulting at $150–$500 per hour, with strategy projects priced per scope. Our strategy work starts as a fixed-scope assessment at $20,000 to $80,000, stated before we begin. The full market picture is in our AI consulting rates guide.
- What is the 30% rule for AI?
- It circulates in a few versions; the most common says AI tends to automate around 30% of the tasks in a job rather than whole jobs. Treat it as a conversation starter. Task mix varies so much between roles that no rule of thumb can stand in for looking at your actual workflows.
- Do we need an AI strategy before we build anything?
- Not always. If you have one contained, clearly valuable use case, a scoped build teaches you more than a plan would. Strategy earns its cost when there are many candidate uses competing for budget, shared data problems underneath them, or governance exposure across them. Part of our assessment is telling you which situation you’re in.
Tell us about the work.
A few lines is enough. We read every enquiry ourselves and reply within one business day.