The term covers at least four different businesses. They price differently, deliver differently, and fail differently. Working out which one is quoting you explains most of what you need to know.
The four kinds
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The strategy consultancy
Sells assessments, readiness frameworks and roadmaps. Produces a document. Genuinely useful for a large organisation with a governance problem; expensive and slow for a twenty-person company that just wants invoices to stop being retyped.
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The reseller
Implements somebody else product and takes a margin. Fine when the product genuinely fits. The risk is that every problem looks like the thing they resell.
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The build shop
Writes the automations. Delivers a working system and hands it over. The question to ask is what happens after handover, because a system nobody monitors degrades quietly.
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The operator
Builds it and then runs it, monitors it, and reports on it. Higher ongoing involvement, and the only model where the supplier feels the consequences of building something fragile.
How to tell which one you are talking to
Ask what you get in the first month. A strategy firm says a workshop and an assessment. A reseller says a licence and configuration. A build shop says a working automation. An operator says a working automation and the alerting behind it.
Then ask who gets the alert when it breaks at seven on a Tuesday. Only one of the four has a confident answer.
Do you need one at all?
Not always. If your problem is one tidy workflow between two modern tools, someone capable in your own team can build it in an afternoon and should. If it touches several systems, needs to run unattended, or would embarrass you if it failed silently, that is when outside help earns its fee.
Our position is on about: we are the operator, not the advisor.
Questions we get asked
Is a strategy phase ever worth it?
In a large organisation with many stakeholders, often yes. In a twenty-person business it usually delays the thing that would have paid back by now.
How big should an AI agency be?
Big enough to survive and small enough that the person who builds it is reachable. Beyond that, judge on the answers to the failure questions rather than headcount.
What qualifications should we look for?
Systems integration experience matters more than AI credentials. The hard part of this work is making systems talk to each other reliably, which is a much older discipline.
Should they specialise in our industry?
Helpful but not decisive. The shape of the work is remarkably similar across sectors: something arrives, someone reads it, someone types it somewhere else.