AI Strategy Consulting
AI strategy consulting answers a practical question: which AI use cases are worth your money, in what order, and with what technology. StepTo runs readiness assessments, feasibility studies, and build-vs-buy analyses, then implements the resulting roadmap with our own engineers — from LLM integrations and RAG systems to production ML pipelines — as part of our custom software development practice. Working from Serbia's 60,000-strong IT talent market at $35–75/hr, we make serious AI work affordable for mid-sized companies, not just enterprises.
AI Consulting Services
- AI readiness assessment: Audit of your data quality and accessibility, existing systems, and team skills, scored against candidate use cases — with a roadmap ranked by ROI and feasibility.
- Use-case discovery workshops: Structured sessions with department leads to surface automation and augmentation opportunities, filtered against cost and risk.
- Build vs buy vs API analysis: 24-month cost models comparing off-the-shelf tools, foundation-model APIs, and custom development per use case.
- LLM integration planning: Model selection (commercial APIs vs open-weight models), RAG architecture over your document and data estate, prompt and evaluation design, and inference-cost budgeting.
- Proof-of-concept development: A working pilot on your real data in 6–10 weeks, with measured accuracy and cost per transaction — evidence before investment.
- AI governance & compliance: GDPR-compliant data flows to model providers, EU AI Act risk classification, human-oversight design, and evaluation logging.
- MLOps & production planning: Deployment architecture, monitoring for drift and quality regression, and cost controls for systems that move beyond pilot.
Where AI Delivers ROI First
- Document-heavy operations: Extraction and classification of invoices, contracts, claims, and compliance documents.
- Customer support: Draft responses, ticket triage and routing, and knowledge-base answering with human review.
- Internal knowledge access: RAG assistants over policies, project archives, and technical documentation.
- Sales & marketing operations: Lead enrichment, proposal drafting, and content production workflows.
- Forecasting & anomaly detection: Demand planning, churn scoring, and quality monitoring where historical data exists.
Engagement Models & Pricing
- Readiness assessment (3–5 weeks): Fixed fee, typically $10,000–25,000, ending in a costed roadmap. Rates $35–75/hr; see pricing.
- Proof of concept (6–10 weeks): One use case built on your data with measured results, typically $20,000–60,000.
- Dedicated AI team: From $13,500/month to industrialise successful pilots and work through the roadmap.
- Staff augmentation: ML and LLM engineers embedded with your team from $4,500/month per engineer.
Why StepTo for AI Strategy
- Strategy backed by delivery: Recommendations are written by people who will have to build them — which keeps roadmaps honest about effort and feasibility.
- Model-agnostic: We work across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-weight models (Llama, Mistral), choosing per use case on quality, cost, and data-residency grounds.
- Evidence over hype: Every pilot ships with an evaluation harness measuring accuracy and cost per transaction, so go/no-go decisions rest on numbers.
- European compliance context: GDPR and EU AI Act considerations are built into architecture decisions from the start.
How an AI Strategy Engagement Runs
- Discovery (week 1–2): Stakeholder interviews, data and systems audit, and a long-list of use cases.
- Prioritisation (week 3–4): Feasibility and ROI scoring; build/buy/API recommendation per short-listed use case.
- Roadmap delivery (week 5): Sequenced plan with budgets, governance requirements, and success metrics per initiative.
- Pilot (6–10 weeks): The top use case built and evaluated on real data.
- Scale: Production hardening, MLOps, and successive roadmap items under a dedicated team or staff augmentation.
FAQ: AI Strategy Consulting
- How much does AI strategy consulting cost?
- An AI readiness assessment — auditing your data, systems, and candidate use cases, and delivering a prioritised roadmap — typically costs $10,000–25,000 over 3–5 weeks. A proof of concept for one use case usually runs $20,000–60,000 over 6–10 weeks. Production implementation depends on scope but benefits from the same rate structure: StepTo engineers bill $35–75/hr, roughly 40–60% below Western European or US AI consultancies.
- How do you decide whether we should build, buy, or use an API?
- We compare three paths per use case: an off-the-shelf AI product, a solution assembled on foundation-model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-weight models), and custom model training. For most business use cases, API-based solutions with retrieval (RAG) win on time-to-value and cost; custom training only pays off with proprietary data at scale or hard latency/cost constraints. The recommendation comes with a cost model covering licences, inference spend, and engineering effort over 24 months.
- What makes a good first AI use case?
- The best first projects have three properties: the task is high-volume and repetitive (document processing, support triage, report drafting), the data needed already exists in accessible systems, and an imperfect output is reviewable by a human rather than catastrophic. We deliberately steer first projects away from mission-critical automated decisions — the goal is a measurable win that builds organisational confidence and infrastructure for the harder use cases.
- How do you address AI governance, privacy, and the EU AI Act?
- The roadmap includes a governance track: data-protection review of what may be sent to which model providers (with EU-hosted or self-hosted options where required by GDPR), risk classification of use cases against the EU AI Act, human-oversight design for higher-risk workflows, and evaluation procedures that log and measure model behaviour before and after deployment.
- Can StepTo implement the strategy, not just write it?
- Yes — that is the point of working with an engineering firm rather than a pure advisory. The consultants who scope your roadmap are backed by engineers who build the pilots and production systems, through a fixed-scope project, staff augmentation from $4,500/month per engineer, or a dedicated AI team from $13,500/month. You are never handed a slide deck that another vendor must interpret.