TL;DR
Picking the wrong AI consultant is expensive — not because of their fee, but because of the months you lose and the team trust you burn. Here's a practical checklist to get it right the first time.
**1. Flat fee, scoped project.** If they bill hourly with no cap, they have no incentive to finish. Get a number on paper.
**2. Show me what you built.** Not slides. Not case studies written by their marketing person. Ask to see a working tool they built for a business roughly your size.
**3. Name the tools.** A real consultant will say 'we'll use Microsoft Copilot for documents, Make.com for the automation, and a custom GPT for the FAQ.' If they say 'our proprietary AI platform,' run.
**4. Written outcome.** Before you sign, you should have one paragraph: 'When this is done, your team will do X in 10 minutes instead of 2 hours.' If they can't write that paragraph, they don't know what they're building.
**5. Training included.** Software without training is a paperweight. Make sure 2–4 hours of team training is in the quote.
**6. Local matters more than you think.** A consultant who'll drive to your shop in Glasgow or your ranch outside Lewistown will understand the business better than someone on Zoom from Austin.
**7. Plain English test.** Read their website. If you can't understand what they do in the first 10 seconds, your team won't understand them either.
'We'll do a transformation roadmap.' That's $50K of slides before any actual work.
'We need to do a discovery phase before we can quote.' Discovery is fine, but it should be a fixed-fee, time-boxed audit — not an open invoice.
'We use proprietary AI.' No, they don't. They use OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google's models with a wrapper.
'You need to be AI-native.' Buzzword salad. Your business needs to make money, not change its identity.
For small and mid-sized Montana businesses, local almost always wins. Big firms have $50K minimums and send junior consultants. Local firms quote $2K–$8K projects and the person you meet is the person who does the work.
That's normal. A good consultant offers a paid 2-hour audit ($500–$1,500) that ends with a written list of 3–5 specific things AI could help with, ranked by ROI. No commitment beyond that.
Last updated February 20, 2026 · Written by Aaron Whitfield, Montana AI Consulting.
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