There is a wave of operators, builders, and domain experts trying to break into AI consulting right now. The pattern is consistent. Smart, technical, often deep in a specific industry, frustrated that the inbound is not arriving the way they expected. They have spun up a website, maybe built a product, started posting occasionally, and they are wondering what they are missing.
What follows is not a playbook. My own path into this work had a specific set of conditions that came together in a way I would not pretend to reproduce on demand, and I have not been coaching anyone else through this transition, so there is no track record of breakthroughs to point to. The answer for any individual is going to come out of their own bets, not the steps I took.
What I can do is point at the forces in the market that look real to me right now, and a few things I would think about if I were starting from scratch today. Take what is useful and leave the rest.
What's Actually Resonating Right Now
A common move from people trying to break in is to lead with capability. The pitch is that they can build custom AI tools, integrate models into existing systems, set up agents, automate workflows. These are real skills.
It is not that companies are not buying that work. They are, often from one-person and ten-person shops. You can absolutely build a viable practice as the individual who comes in and ships builds for clients. That is a real path. If you go that direction, the framing still matters, and I would push you toward the embedded version of it, where you are working alongside the team rather than handing them software from the outside.
What is happening, though, is that more companies are starting to ask whether they can do the building work themselves. The tools are getting better, and so are their teams. The pure capability pitch is not the differentiator it was a year ago. The companies that are trying to figure out AI are not short on tools. They are short on direction.
This is not just my read of it. The signal is consistent from a lot of different vantage points right now. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have stood up implementation arms in the last few weeks, with billions in committed capital behind them, because the work of putting AI into a real organization is not something the models can do on their own. Aaron Levie at Box has been describing in detail how much enterprise work is required to actually deploy agents. Mark Cuban is calling AI implementation skills the most valuable commodity in the current job market. Kevin O'Leary recently said that if he were starting over today, helping small and mid-sized businesses adopt AI would be one of the two opportunities he would build a career around. None of these people are saying the same thing exactly. They are all pointing at the same gap.
What seems to be resonating right now, whether you are a one-person shop or a larger firm, is the language around adoption, transformation, enablement, and activation. Helping the team catch up. Sorting out the chaos. Bringing a plan. The reframe I would suggest, even if you plan to do build work, is from "What can I build for this team?" to "How can I help unlock this team?" The build, when it happens, is in service of unlocking the team, not the other way around.
That same frame holds as you grow. The scaling question for a larger practice is not how many more solutions you can ship. It is how many more people you can enable and how much more clarity you can bring to what these tools actually do.
What companies need from you, regardless of the size of your operation, is perspective and confidence. An opinion. A way of doing things. A system. The kind of point of view that lets them trust you to come in and be a change agent. Building is something they can increasingly do on their own. Bringing perspective and confidence to the moment is harder, and it is what is actually getting bought.
How We Think About This Inside Our Own Practice
This is also how we think about Gadoci Consulting. We deliver plenty of solution work across what we call Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3, meaning individual productivity tools, workflow automation, and custom AI applications. The teams we work with leave engagements with real, working software they own and can extend. But the product we are actually selling is not the solutions. It is the transformation, and the solutions are how we get there.
That distinction matters because it changes who we are useful to. A company that needs an automation built and already knows exactly what it wants and how it fits into their work will probably be better off with a development shop. A company that knows AI is changing their function but is not sure where to start, what to commit to, or how to bring their people along, those are the engagements where we add the most value. The solutions get built along the way, but the engagement is structured around the change, not around the deliverables.
If you are building a practice, that is the question I would push you to answer about your own offer. Are you selling the build, or are you selling the change?
Whatever You Claim, Back It Up
The version of positioning I would push back on is generic positioning that sits on top of nothing. "I help companies adopt AI" is a sentence that means almost nothing to a buyer. There are thousands of people saying it, and the buyer has no way to tell them apart.
There are two reasonable moves out of that trap.
The first is specialization. If you already have deep domain experience somewhere, real time on the ground in a specific industry, that is one of the more honest moats available to you. The companies in any vertical share systems, workflows, regulatory pressures, and operational pain. Someone who can sit down with a buyer in that vertical and talk about their actual day before talking about AI starts the conversation in a different place than a generalist does. If that is the wedge available to you, lean into it, but do not be confined by it. Vertical credibility opens doors without having to define every engagement you take.
The second is to make the broad claim, like the rest of us, and bring something real to the table behind it. We make pretty broad claims at Gadoci Consulting. If you read our website, you will see pithy, short positioning. AI consulting, transformation, services. The same kind of claims a lot of other people are making. What sits behind those claims is what makes them mean something: a system, a way of doing things, an opinion about what actually works, customer stories we can point to, testimonials from real engagements. The pithy claim is the door. What is behind it has to be real, and the buyer is going to ask about it.
This is true whether you specialize or stay broad. Anybody can make the claim. The differentiator is whether you can show how you deliver. If you are starting from scratch, the most honest version of this is to be specific about the small set of things you have done and what you learned from them. As the body of work grows, the claim can grow with it.
Show Up as a Person
A common pattern in this space is people trying to look like a firm before they are one. They invent a company name, design a logo, build a corporate-looking website, and write all their copy in the third person. The intent is to look more credible. My read of the market is that the effect is usually the opposite.
Buyers tend to want to talk to a human. They want to know who you are, what you have done, and what you actually believe about their work. A clean personal site that explains who you are and what you do seems to land better than a website pretending to be a fifteen-person firm. Authenticity matters in this space right now in a way it has not always mattered in services. The firm can come later, if you ever want it to. There is no rule that says it has to.
What This Is and What It Isn't
Most of this is what I would consider, knowing what I know about the market right now. None of it is the explanation for how my own practice came together. My path had a specific set of inputs I would not pretend to reproduce, and plenty of the people doing well in this space took routes that look almost nothing like what is above. The advice and the autobiography are different things, and they should not be confused for each other.
What does seem true is that the underlying forces in this market are real. The framing that resonates right now is about adoption and enablement, not just building. Personal brands tend to land better than fake-firm websites. Whatever your positioning is, what really matters is whether you can back it up with something real. None of those are universal laws. They are the shape of the current moment, as best as anyone can read it.
If any of this resonates, take what is useful and leave the rest. The version that works for you is going to come out of your own bets and your own time in the seat.