What should you expect an AI consultant to deliver?

Something you can use on Monday. For a firm of fee earners, that means a job that used to take hours now takes minutes, done by the same people, to the same standard, with the same sign-off. Anything less is a promise about what might happen later.

A great deal of what is sold under the name "AI consultancy" is a document: an assessment of where you are, a roadmap of where you could go, a feasibility study of what might work. Those documents are not worthless, but they leave the hardest part, actually changing the work, to a busy firm that hired help precisely because it lacked the time. Aldbry does not sell documents. It sells a working process, live in the firm, in 30 days.

Why hasn't buying AI licences changed anything?

Many firms have already paid for Copilot, ChatGPT or similar, and the week looks the same. That is not because the tools are poor. It is because a tool is not a process. A fee earner with a chat window still has to find the right file, remember the house style, rebuild the structure of the document and check every figure by hand. The tool helps with a sentence here and there. The job itself is unchanged.

More training on prompting does not close that gap. What closes it is rebuilding the job so the right inputs, templates and checks are joined up before anyone opens a window. That is consultancy work, but it is design and build work, not advice. The guide a tool is not a process goes further into why.

How do you judge an AI consultant before you hire one?

Ask questions that separate delivery from commentary:

  • What will be running at the end? A named process, in use, or a report about processes?
  • How is the fee set? A fixed fee tied to a defined outcome puts the risk on the consultant. Open-ended time and materials puts it on you.
  • What have they built themselves? Ask for systems that are running now, described plainly, not logos.
  • Who reviews client work? Anything going to a client should be approved by a named person in your firm. A consultant who suggests otherwise does not understand professional services.
  • What happens to your clients' information? You should hear a clear answer on confidentiality and on UK GDPR before anything is shared.

There is a longer list in questions to ask an AI consultant, and a way to weigh the answers in how to compare AI consultancies.

What do Aldbry's answers look like?

At the end of 30 days, one process is live and your team is using it. The fee is fixed and agreed in writing first, set by how many steps the process has, how many documents and templates feed it and what it has to connect to. It does not move if the build runs long, and if the process is not live in 30 days, you do not pay.

On building: the team has built and shipped four systems that are running now. They include a B2B sales system, built for a UK supplements brand to generate and qualify trade enquiries, and process automation, built across an agency, running from ideation through content production to publishing.

On review: AI drafts; people approve. A named person signs off anything that goes to a client. On confidentiality: we work under whatever confidentiality agreement you use with any other supplier, and nothing you share is used for anyone else.

Who is the team behind the work?

The team has more than 35 years in industry, combined, and has worked up to project-director level across four frameworks and seven tier-one contractors. The team includes a civil engineer who worked as a Works Manager on TfL LoHAC and at Interserve, Jackson Civil, Barratt and Ringway Jacobs. That background matters because it means the people rebuilding your process have run deadline-driven, document-heavy work themselves. They know what a reviewer looks for and why a late report costs more than the hours it took. About Aldbry has more.

Where does a UK firm usually start?

With the job that eats the most senior time. In most professional services firms that is one of four things: write-ups and reporting, bid and proposal production, client updates, or compliance and audit evidence. The audit estimates which one is costing your firm most, using your own headcount and charge-out rate, and shows every assumption it makes. That answer becomes the starting point for scoping the rebuild.