The AI consultancy buyer's guide

Every enterprise has been pitched by an AI consultancy this year. Most of those pitches blend together. This is the guide we wish existed when we were on the buying side, before we built one.

When to build in-house vs hire

Build in-house if you have a senior ML team, your MLOps and eval infrastructure already exists, and the system you want to build is core IP you must own end-to-end from day one. Hire if you need production AI in weeks, your team is good but not specialized in AI infrastructure, or you would rather buy the methodology now and own the system after.

Red flags in AI consultancies

• They sell you a team, not a system. If their pricing is "X engineers for Y months," you are buying staff augmentation, not a deliverable.
• They cannot show you reference architectures. If they can't draw what they build on a whiteboard, they probably haven't built it.
• They refuse to deploy on your infrastructure. If they need to host the system on their cloud or platform, you are buying SaaS, not custom AI.
• They skip the eval phase. If they don't talk about evaluations in the first call, expect hallucinations in production.
• They don't mention the operate phase. If the engagement ends at deployment, your team will spend six months learning to run the thing they handed over.

Questions to ask before signing

1. Will the source code, model weights, and runbooks be ours from the first commit?
2. What does the eval suite look like, and who runs it after handover?
3. Where will the system run, and how is data flow audited?
4. What does the operate phase look like? How long is the handover?
5. Show me three reference architectures of similar systems you have shipped.
6. Who specifically will be on the team, and what have they shipped before?

What ownership actually means

Real ownership means: source code lives in your repository, model weights live in your storage, training pipelines run on your infrastructure, runbooks live in your wiki, and your team can fork, fine-tune, redeploy, or rip out the system without calling the vendor. If any of those are missing, you don't actually own it.

That is the bar we hold ourselves to. If you would like to talk about what that looks like for your business, book a thirty-minute strategy call at https://ubuntuonline.co.ke/contact.