What AI takes on
- Preparing sessions: reviewing what happened since last time, checking progress on actions, suggesting an agenda.
- Drafting: meeting notes, a shaped strategy, processes, job descriptions, from your notes or an interview.
- Summarising: reading a client's documents, website and meeting notes, and pulling out what matters.
- Follow-up between sessions: reminding people of actions, chasing, answering the team's simple questions.
- Work with the client's team: AI can interview a team member to write down their method, without you being there.
What stays your job
Understanding what's at stake for the client, beyond what's written: tensions, history, what goes unsaid. Advising: choosing priorities, asking the uncomfortable question, helping the owner decide. Getting buy-in: a recommendation is worth nothing if the team doesn't apply it.
That's the rule that works: AI produces and suggests, the consultant and the owner understand and decide. The same principle applies to owners themselves: see structuring your business with AI.
The risks to manage
- Mixing clients. An AI assistant used for all your clients can carry information from one to another. Each client needs their own sealed space.
- Confidentiality. Clients trust you with sensitive information. Check where it goes and how it's used, and prefer business plans and settings.
- Generic advice. An AI without precise context produces recommendations that fit every business, and therefore none.
- Everything stuck in your files. If everything the AI produces stays with you, the client keeps nothing at the end.
A 4-point method
- One space per client, holding their strategy, goals and documents, which the AI reads to prepare your sessions.
- AI drafts, you approve: every document is reviewed, corrected, then approved with the owner.
- Decisions become actions, dated with an owner, which the AI recalls between sessions.
- The client keeps everything: the structure lives with them, and their team keeps using it after you.
What it changes for your practice
Time saved on production can go where the value is: more thinking time with each owner, or more clients supported at the same quality. And your value becomes visible: what remains in writing with the client shows how far they've come.
To avoid: using the time saved to sell more deliverables. Owners don't buy documents; they buy decisions and a business that moves forward.
To organise yourself across clients: keeping track of every client. On the job itself: becoming a right-hand to business owners.