AI Consulting Services That Start With a Decision, Not a Deck
Most AI consulting engagements produce a slide deck and a bill. gAIcko produces decisions — build vs. buy, vendor short-lists, sequencing — that a CFO can approve and an engineering team can ship the next Monday.
The four decisions every AI consulting engagement has to answer
Cutting through the noise, every AI investment reduces to four questions. If your advisor cannot answer them clearly for your business, they are not consulting — they are selling. gAIcko engagements are structured around answering them in writing.
- What to automate first. Not the loudest workflow, not the executive's favourite — the one with the shortest path to measurable cash impact.
- Build, buy, or leave alone. Some problems are commodity (buy). Some are differentiating (build). Some are not worth automating this year (leave alone). Getting this wrong is the single most expensive mistake in AI budgets today.
- Which model, which vendor, which architecture. GPT-5, Gemini 3, Claude 4.5, open-source Llama, specialist providers. The right answer is workload-specific and changes every quarter.
- Who owns and operates it after launch. Internal team, external team, hybrid. This decision determines your ongoing cost curve for the next three years.
Engagement formats
We deliberately keep formats narrow and fixed-fee. There is no hourly meter running.
- Diagnostic Sprint (1 week). A ranked opportunity map with rough ROI on the top five ideas. Delivered as a working document, not a pitch deck.
- AI Blueprint (3–4 weeks). A full 12-month roadmap with build-vs-buy calls, vendor short-lists, operating model, governance and cost projections. This is the artifact your board, CFO and engineering lead can align on.
- Fractional AI Lead (monthly). A senior operator embedded 2–3 days a week to sequence, review and unblock. Best for companies that have already picked their first three initiatives and need adult supervision to ship them.
- Delivery oversight. We supervise your in-house or agency team, run evals, and hold the line on quality when internal politics start to bend it.
Where we are strong — and where we are not
We are strong on lead-to-cash workflows, customer support, content and marketing operations, back-office automation, and anything that combines an LLM with an existing SaaS stack. We are not the right partner for on-prem legacy migrations, low-level ML research, or building foundation models from scratch. We will tell you this on the first call rather than at the end of a losing engagement.
Vendor neutrality, on the record
gAIcko takes no referral fees, resale margins or affiliate commissions from any AI vendor. Our income is entirely from our clients. That is why our advice on OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, AWS, HubSpot, Salesforce, n8n and every other provider is genuinely comparable — and why we can recommend leaving a workflow alone when that is the honest answer.
Related
See board-level AI strategy, AI automation delivery, the AI Blueprint and the free diagnostic audit. Or view pricing.
Next step
Contact gAIcko and we will scope the smallest engagement that answers your biggest AI decision.
Frequently asked questions
When should I hire a consultant vs. buy an off-the-shelf tool?
Buy when the workflow is generic and non-differentiating (email, calendars, ticketing). Consult and build when the workflow touches how you actually make money — pricing, underwriting, matching, routing, ranking, personalised outreach.
When should I build in-house vs. work with gAIcko?
Build in-house only if AI is the product. If AI supports the product, a small external senior team ships 3–5x faster than growing headcount, and you avoid a permanent salary bill for skills that evolve every quarter.
How do you price?
Fixed-fee sprints (1–2 weeks), fixed-scope blueprints (3–4 weeks) and monthly retainers for shipping. No hourly billing.
Who owns the IP?
You do. All prompts, code, agents, evals and infrastructure are transferred to your accounts on day one and remain yours.
Do you have skin in the game?
Yes. Every engagement is scoped to a written outcome (hours saved, response time, conversion, cost per ticket) with checkpoints. If we miss the checkpoint we work for free until we hit it.
What is the smallest engagement you accept?
A one-week diagnostic sprint. It is enough to produce a ranked opportunity map with rough ROI on the top five ideas.