An AI consultant is an external person who can help your organisation make better use of AI. This could include generative AI or simpler machine learning models. The AI consultant should have expertise both in AI and implementing AI projects in a business context, and they can act as a bridge between the fast-moving world of AI and the practical needs of a business. They will help a business make use of AI for automation, risk reduction, data insights, customer service, cost cutting, or other uses.
An AI consultant can work on a strategic level (AI strategy consulting) and plan or conduct an AI transformation and create AI roadmaps, or on a technical level, developing and deploying machine learning models, and improving the existing use of AI.
AI strategy consultant
For example, the management at a company may be aware that they “need AI” in some form, but are not sure how to start. In these cases, an AI consultant can look at the business and understand the data and business processes, and identify the highest value opportunities. This would be a case to call in an AI strategy consultant.
Technical AI consultant
On the other hand, the management may know what they want AI to do in the company and may have started work on building an AI tech stack, and they need some extra expertise or muscle to get the best ROI out of the AI initiatives. In this case it would be more of a technical AI consulting engagement.
A good AI consultant is someone who can explain neural networks to a board of directors without making their eyes glaze over, while also ensuring the company doesn’t spend $2 million on a chatbot that never gets used.
Companies may not always have the AI expertise in-house in order to implement the AI solutions they need. An external AI consultant will have already orchestrated AI transformations in several different companies and can bring learnings from those experiences, whereas your in-house employees will be doing it the first time.
AI consultants are available in specific or niche areas of AI. Fast Data Science specialises in natural language processing, so you should talk to us especially if you have large amounts of documents in unstructured text form, such as PDFs, scanned documents, audio, transcripts, or email dumps.
Over time, an AI consulting engagement may turn into a long term retainer agreement, such as a fractional chief AI officer or head of AI, which could be a new C-level executive in your organisation.
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The AI consulting gold rush means that you will find a large number of generalists offering expensive “consulting services”, which are often simply a wrapper around GPT. You may find people who will charge over $1500 per day to connect up your systems to a ChatGPT subscription. The same people may be unavailable when the solution that they “built” stops working.
A good AI consultant will explain to you what your options are: is there an off-the-shelf product that can do the job? Do you need bespoke software developed? Should we train a machine learning model? Can we use generative AI and is it accurate, fast, cheap, or secure enough for your use case? Is AI even needed or will a rule-based solution do the job?
Fast Data Science has been offering AI consulting for over a decade, since 2016. Check out our Google reviews to see what our clients say about us: https://share.google/nUPCZhYHMACGdBryh
References are available on request.
Below, you can see some of the jobs we’ve undertaken in the past for small, medium, and large enterprises. There is a diverse spread of industries. Like accounting or HR, AI is becoming an ancillary function that you might find in any kind of business. Find out more in our case studies section.
An open-source, NLP and generative AI-driven tool for harmonising questionnaire items, even across different languages, developed for the Wellcome Data Prize in Mental Health. Try Harmony online.
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Foreflight provides a powerful mobile app used by commercial pilots for flight planning and in-flight naviation. It is an electronic flight bag which runs on iOS and iPadOS devices. We analysed Foreflight's customer database to identify any users likely to churn (cancel their subscription).
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The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is the British national rail regulator, responsible for health and safety on mainline rail, the London Underground, light rail, and trams.
Fast Data Science built a drag-and-drop dashboard which allowed internal users at the ORR to analyse data collected on train delays, flooding, accidents, construction, etc, and build machine learning models on the fly.
Learn MoreA Natural Language Processing-powered tool developed for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, assisting experts in estimating the risk of a clinical trial ending uninformatively. The Clinical Trial Risk Tool also reads a clinical trial protocol and creates an itemised per-subject budget from the schedule of events, looking up costs in hospital charge masters. Try the Clinical Trial Risk Tool.
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For a number of large pharma multinationals, we have been developing natural language processing models to redact sensitive data (PHI) or commercially sensitive information from clinical trial narrative reports, protocols, statistical analysis plans, synopses, ICFs, and other documents.
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Tesco is the UK's largest grocery retailer with over 15 million regular shoppers. We developed machine learning models to predict the amount in kilos that a shopper will put in their basket, as well as the turnaround time of delivery vehicles, in order to improve route optimisation and driver rostering.
Learn MoreBelow you can see a non-exhaustive summary of the tasks that an AI consultant might do for you:
| AI consultant’s task | Description |
|---|---|
| Assessment and analysis | Identify business areas where AI can make the most impact. |
| Data exploration | Under NDA, the consultant analyses the quality and potential of the in-house data. |
| Strategy development | Create a roadmap (AI strategy) to align AI initiatives with business goals. |
| Solution implementation | Build predictive models, chatbots, or AI-enhanced tools. For example, for predicting employee churn, customer churn, customer complaints, or clinical trial failure. |
| Machine learning model deployment | With consultants onboard, companies can accelerate the adoption of AI technologies. |
| Monitoring and optimisation | Ensuring AI systems deliver consistent value post-deployment. |
| Ethical guidance | Navigate regulatory and ethical challenges, such as data privacy, GDPR, HIPAA and algorithmic bias. |
| Fractional head of AI | Fast Data Science can provide a fractional head of AI on a retainer basis. This is similar to the role a CTO would play, but focused on AI. |
| Due diligence and expert witness work | Analysis of target companies in technology related acquisitions, and expert witness statements and depositions for civil litigation. The Director, Thomas Wood, has completed the Cardiff University Bond Solon training for expert witness work in England and Wales. |
We take on generalist AI consulting engagements, and our speciality area within AI is natural language processing, which is the area of AI that deals with processing information in human languages. If you are in an industry with large amounts of unstructured data stuck in documents, PDFs, audio files, scanned documents, or similar (such as pharmaceuticals, legal, or insurance), then you should definitely give Fast Data Science a call.
Examples of NLP include:
Above: an introductory video about natural language processing consulting at Fast Data Science.
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