Part of our guide: AI strategy
Almost every firm in this market describes itself as independent, and almost none of them mean anything by it that you could check. The word costs nothing to say, it cannot be disproved in a first meeting and it appears on every website in the category. Ours said it too, in four slightly different forms on four different pages, until we noticed that an adjective everyone claims is not a differentiator and rewrote it as a set of facts.
There is a better question, and the useful thing about it is that you can usually answer it before anybody has spoken to you. Ask what the firm sells, and then ask whether their recommendation could ever be that you do not need it.
The free workshop is the tell
A great many AI consultancies will run you a workshop at no charge. It is a genuinely useful session in most cases, staffed by capable people, and it ends in a document. Look at what the document contains, because that is where the model reveals itself. If the deliverable is a proposal for the firm's own implementation work, with their deliverables, their timelines and their costs, then the workshop was never the product. It was the qualification stage, and it can be given away because the advice it produces is an argument for the build that follows.
None of that is dishonest and it is not a reason to avoid those firms, many of which are very good at building things. It is simply a reason to know what you are in. A free diagnostic supplied by the party who would carry out the treatment is a sales process with a clinical vocabulary, and the conclusion was available to anybody who understood the business model before the first meeting was booked.
Three shapes, and what each has to recommend
The first shape is the builder, meaning a software firm or systems integrator with engineers on the bench. Their fixed costs are people, so their commercial interest is a build, and the answer that emerges from any assessment they run will tend to be a build. If your actual problem is that a process is badly designed and no software would fix it, that answer exists outside the range of things they can profitably conclude.
The second shape is the reseller, who earns a margin or a commission on the licences you buy. They will often be the most knowledgeable people you meet on the product they sell, and the recommendation still arrives pre-shaped, because a recommendation that reduces your licence count reduces their revenue. The tell here is that the shortlist always contains the thing they resell, and the comparison is always favourable.
The third shape is the platform partner, and this one deserves more care than it usually gets, because it is where most people's reasoning goes wrong. A firm holding an accreditation with a model provider is not thereby compromised. Certification means somebody passed an exam and met a technical standard, and it tells you something real about capability. What matters is whether the badge comes attached to money, so the question to ask is not whether they hold a partnership but whether they are paid by the partner.
Certification is not the same as commission
It is worth separating these properly, because the loose version of the independence argument treats every vendor relationship as a conflict and that is neither true nor useful. A firm accredited across several providers is in a better position to compare them than a firm accredited with none, and if the accreditation carries no payment then it changes nothing about what they can afford to recommend.
The conflict that matters is financial, so the test is financial. Money flowing from a vendor to your adviser gives your adviser an interest in your decision that is not your interest. An exam does not. Judge the arrangement on where the money comes from rather than on how many logos appear in the footer, and the picture becomes much clearer.
Four questions worth asking in the first meeting
What do you sell besides advice? If the answer is implementation, licences or seats, the recommendation is not free of that. It may still be the right recommendation, and you should weigh it knowing where it comes from.
Does anyone other than me pay you in connection with this work? Ask it as a closed question and listen for the qualifications. Commission, referral fees, resale margin, rebates and marketing development funds are all the same thing in different clothing.
What would have to be true for you to tell me to do nothing this year? A firm that cannot describe that scenario has not got one, and a diagnosis with only one possible outcome is not a diagnosis.
Who assembled the shortlist, and what is on it that you have no relationship with? The absence of an unaffiliated option on a shortlist tells you more than anything written in the comparison columns.
Where we stand
We charge for our AI strategy workshop, at a price published on the page, and the reason is contained in everything above. We are paid by the client, and only by the client. We take no commission, referral fee or resale margin from any vendor, we have no implementation arm that needs feeding, and we are not tied to a single platform. That is what makes it possible for the conclusion of a half day to be that your current stack is adequate, that the problem is a process rather than a product, or that this is not the year to start.
It also means we have to be worth the fee on the day, which is the correct pressure to be under. A firm that gives the advice away has to recover the cost somewhere, and it recovers it from the work the advice recommends.
If you want the picture established properly rather than in half a day, that is Breathe. If you already know the use case and need it built with governance and measurement designed in, that is Flow. And if the gap is that nobody senior owns AI at all, that is Grow, or the wider fractional CTO role where the whole technology function is the thing without an owner.
We have argued elsewhere that the operating model matters more than the technology and that one model should not check its own work. This is the same argument applied to the people you buy advice from. A second opinion is only worth having when the person giving it can afford to disagree with you, and with themselves.