What is AI Consulting?

Technology has been advanced significantly over the last two decades. This industry has become so vast that some people find it hard to utilize the systems and programs it offers. AI consulting is a process where businesses get help to come up with innovative algorithms and machine learning tools to enable come up with developed AI-driven solutions and products.

In simple, AI consulting helps companies understand and utilize Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their operations. Proper designing, integration, and AI implementation in a business set up is vital for optimum results. When choosing an AI consultant, you must be very vigilant to ensure that they will contribute to the success of your business’ future strategies.

Why is AI Consulting Important Now?

Presently, the use of technology has helped very many businesses to remain ahead of their competitors. Using AI has been an effective way of cutting down the business's expenses and increasing the efficiency of its operations. Currently, there is an upsurge in demand for artificial intelligence products, but the supply is a little bit low.

This could have been due to yet-to-mature technology or confusion when it comes to finding the right company to hire.

What are the Typical AI Consulting Activities?

Generally speaking, AI consulting involves educating businesses on how to achieve artificial intelligence transformation. Like any other type of consulting, AI consulting, too, can be divided into four major categories:

1. Formulating strategies

This is a process that helps to determine how the client will use AI. The consultant needs to understand your strategies, data and analytics capabilities, and your company’s challenges and opportunities. This will help them decide which AI initiatives are the best for your business. Strategy formulation through AI consulting is done in the following steps:

• Understanding the current status of your company by using solutions like process mining and strategy analysis.
• Building a portfolio of potential AI initiatives to understand how artificial intelligence can contribute to the business.
• Value prediction for an AI project. This is necessary to ensure that a business doesn’t put in too much investment than what the AI project is expected to yield.
• Selecting artificial intelligence solutions and data sets that can be used in machine learning models.
• Launching pilot projects to check how viable the AI projects are.
• Identifying scaling challenges and creating effective solutions.

2. Commercial Due Diligence

The success factors in AI vary from those in other fields. With a clear understanding of the AI market, the consultant can conduct detailed due diligence. One month is the time required for the consulting team to come up with inputs to a valuation.

The difference between the evaluation of an AI solution’s commercial success and that of other software arises because:

• Better and more labeled data is required to achieve the superiority of a deep-learning focused AI solution.
• Engineering teams and data science teams are evaluated differently.

3. Implementation

This step involves several activities, including project management, development, planning, and improving business processes affected by the AI project, among others. Implementations can and are mostly done in-house. However, if there is no tech know-how, the best option is to work with consultants. It would help if you always remembered that working with consultants for complete implementation instead of doing it in-house is more expensive.

4. Training

The primary goal of consulting services is to improve the client’s skills and culture. As the client, you have to be sure that your team has the capability and the knowledge on the AI project you are working on.

How to choose your AI consultant? /How to choose a company

Landing on the best AI consultant can be challenging, especially if you are new in this field. You need to ask yourself several questions to ensure that the AI consultant firm that you choose will bring out the best results for your business. These questions are:

• How experienced is the consultant? Currently, there is a wide variety of consulting firms, and they differ depending on the industry they focus on and their skill sets. One firm could be good at object detection while the other can do marvelous in text classification. Understanding your type of business will help you determine the kind of expertise you are looking for in an AI consultant. For Data Wow, we offer an AI development consultation service and training that is specifically designed to address your team needs, both on-site and remotely.

• How necessary is it? The answer to this question lies in your predictions on the short-term benefits that you anticipate from the installation of AI solutions. Businesses that are on their early growth stages can consider other technologies for the short-run.

• Do you have the necessary human resources? After acquiring an AI solution, it is advisable to work on the project in-house. Hiring people with the right skill set will be advantageous to your employees in that they can learn a lot from the process and help you later. How skilled your human resource determines how hard or simple it will be to evaluate the consultant's performance.

What Business Cases or Business Questions you should Pick First When doing a Consultation

As you consider going the artificial intelligence way, you need to have full details on different issues. There is no one else at a better position to clarify such details other than an AI consultant. These are some of the questions and business cases that you can present to such a professional during a consultation session:

• Why do I need AI, and how will it solve the problems in my business?
• What model does the consulting firm use to deliver their solution?
• What improvements will artificial intelligence make to your customer engagement?
• Are the data sources that will be used by AI trustworthy?
• Can the data management systems that you have in place work with artificial intelligence?
• What is the impact of AI solutions on the employees in your business/company/organization?
• Who carries the liability if the solution does not work?
• What are the qualifications possessed by the technical team?
• What Return on Investment (ROI) has been seen by the previous clients, and what criteria have been used to measure that?