Expertise Levels in AI Consulting

A follow-up article from the one on Saturday regarding selecting the right consultant for the business, I usually assess for many skill levels across a broad domain of projects. I do this because Structure AI , my consulting company, is an industry-agnostic AI consulting firm that guides clients through the implementation of AI in their business-critical use cases.

Typically, this will take the form of simplistic contract execution in a very specific use case through the validation and execution of novel businesses. Due to the level of expertise needed to execute in an environment like this, I am forced to assess skill levels tightly as though we were hiring for any Big Tech position.

Considering these needs, our clients can rest assured we have their best interests at heart with high-quality implementation staff given we keep standards as though these folks may have been hired in Big Tech.

The AI Newbie

This is a persona I've seen out in the industry where the consultant has an immense lack of technical depth but has just enough understanding of it to apply it to their job and then offer it as a service to many small businesses.

I want to keep in mind these people are still respected and can reach a market some may not be able to reach otherwise, but they would be the equivalent of a junior consultant without the oversight of someone more senior and so may or may not truly be producing the best quality work to move the business forward.

I usually shy away from hiring these for any client jobs as I'm not sure they will get healthy work done and would rather hire someone with a solid background to handle the implementation of contracts that come through.

If you are one of these folks, I'd recommend DM'ing me so we can build up a portfolio instead of leaving you in the dark.

The Consummate Entry-Level

These are folks who have built a solid, but small portfolio of projects and may know how to solidly tackle one use case. You can expect them to have done either self-study or college education and to need significant guidance through a few projects and industries before they get their sea legs going appropriately. Structure AI gives our juniors proper oversight and quality checks so we can ensure they are progressing safely in a manner that will realize real success for a client. Generally, I'd be looking for about 3 months - 3 years of equivalent experience for a role like this.

Again, if you need help building up your expertise and want to grow in your career, please DM me.

The Solid Mid-Level

Through their years on the job, they will have built up a small-medium size set of projects discussing how their nuances in interacting with past clients has allowed them to build up successfully into new clients. Being a terminal career level, we can expect these folks to have key questions about strategic progress on any project execution details, but should largely be able to handle day-to-day execution on their lonesome and begin to do project management of their workload without issue. These folks we can expect to be 3-6 years in total experience or self-study equivalent.

If you want to build up your skills from this point, please DM me so I can better understand your needs.

The Experienced Senior

Experienced Seniors will often have 6-9 years of total experience of which they will have built up a particularly thorough list of projects they have executed and can point to for successful work. At this level, they will also need to begin to show thought leadership as they break into the role of principal who needs to guide clients and project teams through the implementation of big business objectives for clients.

While still mostly technical, these folks will begin to dip their toes in business processes and help with client meetings, taking over at a point when the pre-sales enablement work has been done.

Folks at this level will also regularly share news of their success at driving business outcomes for clients and will draft a business blog, technical papers, and other sales & marketing technical enablement work.

The Innovating Principal

Innovating principals will have built a large breadth of portfolio experience and have the equivalent of 9-12 years of experience with a significant amount of specialization in their area of interest. These folks are very well sought out for their knowledge applicable in their domain and will be publishing an array of thought leadership, technical papers, sales & marketing material, speaking gigs, podcasts, and other material regularly.

Given the level of depth and experience in their field, it doesn't make sense for them to handle the day-to-day implementation work anymore and so will outsource it while they focus on drawing others into the business with their expertise.

We can also expect these individuals to start being named board advisors on relevant companies because of their great expertise and can typically attract companies of all sizes to them with their thought leadership.

They are also likely to be launching novel business structures and so are likely doing that as well and then acting within the C-suite on it (a true C-suite executive. Not a startup C-suite executive).

The consultant-engineer-researcher confusion

All folks who work in this space are highly skilled, but there's also confusion that happens around the differentiation between consultant, engineer, and researcher within the full set of skill levels.

Consultants will typically take the finished products of AI engineers & researchers and handle implementation & configuration within a client workflow.

Engineers typically code and productize a software product relative to a well-scoped implementation plan and will release it once all features and quality checks have been implemented.

Researchers have gone into a formal PhD to study a niche part of human knowledge and bring it to bear for client business. Typically, they are expected to code the software product too, but will handle the niche problems an engineer can't solve. Their work will also regularly result in research papers published to top journals.

In Structure AI , our goal is to focus on pre-existing products as much as possible to keep costs low and implement custom software products as needed. Even in building a custom software product or workflow, we will tend toward scalable, existing products as much as possible to make the implementation of the work seamless, but will make new parts as necessary.

These disciplines each have the full progression shown above relative to the discipline, with everything evolving into the "Innovating Principal" archetype described above.

Assessing the skill level for your project

As described above, this has laid out what the different skill levels are, but not how to assess what is needed for your specific project. It's usually a level of common sense, but there also needs to be sufficient technical knowledge to guide you through the variability in projects that come through the door.

Oftentimes, even the easiest projects can be misleading if we're doing a simple product, but the work already exists in other products for example. In these cases, I've gone as far to reposition an entire product and provide recommendations on what I think would be better for long-term profitability.