How to evaluate an AI consultant before signing
The questions that separate people who deliver work from people who deliver decks. Sample deliverables, go/no-go gates, and who actually does the work.
Field notes
Right now, someone in your company is pasting client data into ChatGPT
Most CEOs of mid-sized companies do not know it is happening. Most will not, until it becomes a problem with a name, a date, and a legal notice attached.
Everyone says 2026 is the year AI changes everything. You are still in committee.
Morgan Stanley told institutional money to brace for something. GPT-5.4 is already at expert level on economically valuable tasks. The curve gets steeper from here.
A five-person company is going to outcompete you in 2026. Here is how.
Sam Altman's near-term vision has companies of one to five people outcompeting large incumbents. Versions of that already exist.
There are four stages. Most companies are stuck in stage one.
Most companies are in stage one and calling it a strategy. The four stages expose what separates the companies that move from those that stay stuck.
Your AI project is not failing because of the technology.
If there is clarity and capable teams, it accelerates. If there is organizational disorder, it exposes it. Most companies assume they are in the first category.
You adopted AI. That is not the same as implementing it.
More than half of companies use AI somewhere. Almost none have significant financial impact from it. The gap between those two things is not a technology problem.
Your best people are funding AI out of their own pockets. Your AI budget is still under review.
The ROI was not demonstrated through a corporate pilot. It was demonstrated through thousands of individuals making the same quiet decision: this is worth twenty dollars of my own money.
Glean alternatives: open-source enterprise AI search without the €50k/year lock-in
Glean is the gold standard for a reason. But the price tag excludes most mid-market companies. Onyx and the managed open-source model change that equation if you understand the tradeoffs.
Are you an AI company, or a company that has an AI slide in the deck?
Are you an AI company, or are you a software company with AI features? The distinction matters more than it might seem right now.
You are trying to buy AI the same way you bought software
The CEO is not being slow or cautious. The CEO is applying a rational procurement process to something the procurement process was not built to handle.
What does an AI readiness assessment actually cost in 2026?
Bpifrance funds them at €10k for eight days. Big Four price them at five times that. What you actually get depends on who does the work and what happens after the report.
AI consulting for mid-market companies: what it costs and what you actually get
The floor is a slide deck. The ceiling is a six-figure engagement. All three are called AI consulting. None of them are the same product.
AI agents vs hiring: what a 200-person company should automate first
You do not have a headcount problem. You have a workflow problem that you keep trying to solve by hiring another person to do the same invisible work.
The hidden payroll: what 'finding out' costs a mid-market company every week
The most expensive line item on your P&L is not salaries. It is the work your people redo because nobody wrote down how the last one solved it.
SOP vs reality: why your documented processes lost to the informal ones
Every company has two operating systems. The one on paper and the one that actually moves work forward. They diverge from day one, and the informal version always wins.