Question 1

What is AI consulting?

Accepted Answer

Deciding what in your business is worth automating with AI, what is not, and in what order, before any money goes into building. In practice it is a short diagnostic, a ranked shortlist, and a plan with a number on it. The part most people underestimate is the second item: a good consultant should name the things you were about to automate that would have made the operation worse.

Question 2

What does an AI consultant actually do?

Accepted Answer

Sits with the people doing the work, maps where their hours go, and tests which of those hours a model can reliably take. Then prices it. The output is a ranked list of three with a cost and a payback on each, plus the ones to avoid and why. A consultant who cannot build will hand that list to someone else; I build the first item and keep it running, which is the only way to know the advice was right.

Question 3

How much does an AI consultant cost in Canada?

Accepted Answer

The readiness assessment here is $2,500 CAD, fixed, for two weeks, and it is credited against the roadmap if you continue. Hourly consultants in this market commonly run from a low to mid three figures an hour and retainers from a low four figures a month, with no deliverable attached to either. A fixed scope with a named output is the version worth paying for; an open meter is how businesses spend a year on slides.

Question 4

Who are the best AI consulting companies?

Accepted Answer

For a business under a few hundred people, probably not the ones in the listicles. The large firms price deployment like transformation and staff it with people who have never run the system they are recommending. The useful test is to ask who, specifically, will do the work, and what they shipped in the last twelve months. If the answer is a team and a deck, keep looking.

Question 5

Is AI consulting worth it for a small business?

Accepted Answer

It is worth it when you have a process somebody repeats a hundred times a day and nobody has measured it. It is not worth it when you want to use AI in general; that is a question without an answer. The assessment exists to tell a small business, quickly and for a fixed fee, whether there is anything here worth building, and the honest answer is sometimes no.

Question 6

What is the difference between AI consulting and AI automation?

Accepted Answer

Consulting decides what to build and whether to build it. Automation builds it and keeps it running. Most firms sell one and hand off the other, which is where the gap between the plan and the thing opens up. Here they are the same person, so the plan is written by someone who has to live with it.

Question 7

Do you work with businesses outside Atlantic Canada?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The work is remote and clients are across Canada and the United States. Being based in Saint John, New Brunswick puts me on Atlantic time, which overlaps a Canadian or American working day comfortably, and means I am in the room when a decision deserves it.

AI Consulting Services

Three things worth automating. Thirty that are not.

Three stages. You can stop after any of them.

Three calls I would end early.

What I would read before paying anyone.

What business owners ask before the first call.

One instrument. You own it.