Do I need an AI consultant, or can I just use ChatGPT?
Updated .
The short answer
For one-off writing and research tasks, ChatGPT or a similar AI assistant, used well, is often all a small business needs. An AI consultant earns their keep when the goal is to change how work flows through the business: connecting systems, automating repeated steps, handling data safely and getting a whole team using the same tools consistently.
What is ChatGPT great for on its own?
- Drafting emails, posts and documents.
- Summarising long documents and meeting notes.
- Brainstorming and getting past a blank page.
- Explaining something you don't understand, in plain English.
If that's what you need, you probably don't need a consultant. Spend an afternoon learning to write clear instructions and you'll get a lot out of it.
Where does it run out of road?
- Everyone uses it differently. Five people, five ways of prompting, five different standards of output.
- It lives in a chat window. Copying text in and out of it all day is still manual work, just a slightly quicker kind.
- Data is easy to get wrong. Without some ground rules, customer details end up pasted into places they shouldn't be.
- Nobody is checking. AI can be confidently wrong, and someone needs to own whether the output is good enough.
What does an AI consultant add?
- Working out which of your tasks are worth handing to AI, and which aren't.
- Connecting AI to the systems you already use, so information flows without copy and paste.
- Setting simple, sensible rules for what goes in and who checks what comes out.
- Training the team so everyone gets the same good results.
I build tools like this myself, some AI-powered and some not:
- Made By Loop: A toolkit for Adobe After Effects that automates the most tedious, repetitive tasks in a motion designer's day. Used by over 6,000 motion designers.
- Ferguson: An AI landing-page auditor: it reviews a landing page and reports on it. Has reviewed 200+ landing pages.
- Warble: Uses AI to turn voice notes into captioned video posts.
- RollBot: Makes reels and GIFs in seconds.
The difference between a tool that's handy and one that saves real hours is almost always in how it's set up around the people using it.
Is there a sensible middle ground?
Absolutely. Try it yourself first. Get the team using an AI assistant for writing tasks and see what sticks. When you hit the point where you want it built into how the business runs, that's when outside help is worth it. There's a starting plan in where a small business should start with AI.
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