There's a whole category of person who showed up in the last few years calling themselves an AI consultant. I'm not one of them, and the difference isn't modesty — it's accuracy. I've been doing this work for twenty years. AI is a tool I picked up partway through, the way I picked up responsive design and headless CMSes and every other thing that came along. It's a powerful tool. It changed what I can do alone. But it's not who I am, and I've watched what happens to people who make a tool their whole identity.
What happens is they spend all their energy defending the identity instead of doing the work. When the tool changes — and it changes every few months now — they have to scramble to stay "the AI person," because that's the whole thing they're selling. It's exhausting and it's backwards.
The tool is the means, never the headline
Here's what AI actually did for me. For twenty years there was a gap between what I knew was possible and what I had time to build. I'd see the better version of a project in my head and never get to it, because the hours weren't there and I couldn't justify the cost to the client. The cobbler's kids problem — I delivered excellence for everyone else and never had time to apply it to my own work.
AI closed that gap. (I built a working Python tool to extract metadata for a photography archive in under two hours — a thing that previously would've been a budget line I couldn't justify.) Now I can flex into areas I always understood but never had time to execute. That's the real story of AI in my work: it didn't make me something new. It let me finally be the thing I already was, without the time and money constraints that always clipped it.
“AI didn't make me an expert. It removed the excuses for not delivering what an expert already knew.”
What this means if you're a business owner
If you're trying to figure out AI for your business, the most useful thing I can tell you is to stop looking for an AI strategy and start looking at your actual problems. AI isn't a destination. It's a tool that's very good at some things and useless or dangerous at others, and the skill is knowing which is which for your situation — not adopting it because everyone says you should.
You don't need an AI consultant. You need someone who understands your business and happens to know where this particular tool helps and where it'll burn you. The tool is the easy part. Knowing what to point it at is the whole job, and that part hasn't changed in twenty years.
