AI consulting for startups and product teams

AI Consulting Services

AI consulting is paid, outside help deciding where AI belongs in your product or operations, then building it, testing it and handing it over. I am an AI consultant who is also a working engineering manager: I lead the team that ships AI agents to production customers at Avoca (YC '23).

Book a 30-min consultation Email instead See what I do

You work directly with the engineer. No account managers, no hand-off to a junior team.

By Diljit, Engineering Manager at Avoca and founder of QRCodeStack. Last updated 8 October 2026.

What does an AI consultant actually do?

An AI consultant works out which problems in your business a language model or agent can solve reliably, builds or oversees the first working version, and sets up the testing that keeps it working once the novelty wears off. The title covers very different jobs, so I split mine into four engagements you can buy separately.

Engagement	Good for	You get
AI strategy and readiness review	You know you should be doing something with AI and do not know what first.	A written assessment: which use case to build first, what it depends on, and which ideas to drop.
AI agent development	You have a use case and need it built and shipped.	A working agent or LLM feature with tool calls, retrieval, guardrails and integration into your systems.
Evals, observability and rescue	An AI feature is live, or nearly, and quality is unpredictable.	An evaluation harness, regression suite and monitoring, plus a diagnosis of what is failing.
Fractional AI engineering leadership	Your team is building with AI and needs senior direction, not a full-time hire.	Part-time architecture, hiring and delivery guidance, billed by days per month.

Is this the right fit for you?

A good fit if You are a startup or product team with a real use case, an engineering team that can own the result, and a wish to avoid paying agency overhead for senior judgement.

Not a fit if You want a slide deck on "AI transformation" with no build behind it, a large offshore team, or a guaranteed business outcome before anything is scoped. I will say so on the first call.

How is this different from an AI consulting firm?

A consulting firm sells a team and a process. I sell one senior engineer's judgement and hands. Which one is right depends on the size and shape of the problem.

	AI consulting firm or agency	Independent AI consultant (me)	Hiring in-house
Who does the work	A delivery team, often with a senior lead who sells and a junior team who builds	One senior engineer, directly	Your new hire, once found and onboarded
Best at	Large, multi-workstream programmes	Focused scoping, builds and second opinions	Long-running ownership of a core system
Weakness	Overhead, and slower to start	Not built for very large, multi-team programmes	Slow to hire, and a wrong hire is expensive
Ends with	Delivery of the programme	A handover to your engineers	Continuous employment

What AI projects do I take on?

Six kinds of project, listed roughly in the order people ask for them.

AI voice agents and call-centre automation. AI receptionists, phone answering and customer service agents that handle real calls. This is my day job, and it has its own page: AI receptionist and voice agent development.
AI agents for business. Custom tool-calling agents that do work inside your product or operations, from a first prototype to production, with the orchestration, guardrails and integrations around them. See the LangGraph tutorial, what an agent harness is, with one built in 80 lines of Python, and a run-not-theorised comparison of agent loops, swarms and graphs.
AI workflow automation. Connecting models to the systems you already run, in tools like n8n, Zapier and Make or in code. One example is this appointment-reminder pipeline built with n8n, PostgreSQL and WhatsApp.
AI chatbots and retrieval over your own data. Support and sales chatbots that answer from your documents and systems using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), so answers come from your content rather than from the model's memory. Read what RAG is and where it fails.
Evals, observability and guardrails. How to know whether an AI system is getting better or worse, and how to stop it saying things it should not. Start with a plain-English guide to evals and the field guide to testing and observability.
Data and backend foundations. The PostgreSQL, Kafka and data-pipeline layer that AI features sit on, and where many production failures actually live.

Where does the experience come from?

Engineering Manager at Avoca (YC '23): I lead the Deployed Engineering team shipping AI voice agents for home-services companies.
Staff Engineer at Twilio: built on Twilio Verify.
PayPal risk platform: infrastructure handling 200M+ payments a day.
Zalando, SingleStore, Wayfair, Nutanix, HP: near real-time ML for fraud detection, control plane and billing, and supply chain systems.
Founder of QRCodeStack: I ship and run my own product, so I think about cost per unit and churn as well as architecture.

DPR Software Labs (OPC) Private Limited, Bangalore, Karnataka 560103, India. More on my background. I use AI tools in my own writing and coding; everything on this page is mine and reviewed by me.

How does an engagement run?

01
Free 30-minute scoping call
What you are building, where it is stuck, and what "working" means in numbers. If I am not the right person, you will hear that here.
02
Written scope and price
What gets built, what does not, what I need from you, how we know it worked, and the cost. Fixed price wherever the scope allows.
03
Build in weekly increments
Something demoable every week and a written update.
04
Handover you can maintain
Code you own, the eval harness, a runbook and a walkthrough with your engineers.

How much does AI consulting cost?

I share rates after we meet. The same label covers a one-hour second opinion and a multi-month build, so price follows scope: how many systems the AI has to touch, whether it only answers or also takes actions, how strict your compliance bar is, and how much testing you need to trust it. Book the free 30-minute call, and I will send a written scope and price afterwards.

Book a call to get rates

Read my work before you hire me

Getting Your Ideal Customer Profile Right: how I decide who a product is for before building anything.
The Essential Metrics for Voice AI Agents: the scorecard I use to judge whether an agent works.
Evals, Testing and Observability: A Field Guide: how to stop shipping regressions you cannot see.
The Anatomy of a Great Prompt: why many quality problems are prompt problems.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an AI consultant and an AI developer?

An AI consultant decides what to build and why, and an AI developer builds it. I do both, and most of the value is in the first step: choosing the use case that can work.

Can I hire you as a freelance AI engineer?

Yes, for fixed-scope builds or a part-time retainer, alongside your own team. I scope every engagement before agreeing to it.

Do you work with companies outside the US?

Yes. I work with teams in the US, UK, Europe and India, with overlap hours agreed up front. Engagements are remote and mostly asynchronous.

What if AI is not the right answer for us?

Then I will say so, and point you to a simpler fix. A short call that ends with "do not build this" is a good outcome.

How do we start?

Book a 30-minute consultation, or email [email protected] with what you are building and where it is stuck.

Have an AI project that needs a clear plan, or needs to ship?

Book a 30-min consultation Email [email protected]

Or find me on LinkedIn. Building voice agents specifically? See AI receptionist and voice agent development.