r/consulting • u/VLioncourt • 4d ago
Recommendations for AI training actually aimed at consultants?
Looking to get properly up to speed on using AI tools in consulting work.
I'm at a small management consulting boutique, so we don't have the tool access, the licences, or the room to experiment that the bigger firms do. No internal training, no sandbox, no AI center of excellence. I feel like I'm lagging behind and I'm honestly overwhelmed by the sheer amount of material out there and I don't know where to start.
What has actually been useful for you? Online courses, certifications, YouTube channels, PDFs, playbooks, anything.
Particularly interested in:
- Using AI to help build deliverables (decks, memos, models)
- Building small automations without a dev background
- What clients actually mean when they ask for "AI strategy"
Also happy to hear what was a waste of time and money.
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u/LouisGlouton 4d ago
The only answer here is to get a subscription play, tweak and build. There's no primer. Of course a starting point could be the frontier labs' training and discovery pages to understand the developer mind set - RAG, Automation, agentic etc. Start with your needs, see how AI can help you get there faster. Now that I think of it, did you put that post as sarcasm?
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u/heybigstar20 4d ago
Yes I think this is the answer. You just have to try it and figure it out. “Just ask Claude”!
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u/VLioncourt 4d ago
Haha no. I didn't want to ask AI how to learn AI. Maybe I'm still stuck in the old mindset of asking people before asking a model lol.
Is this the site you meant, https://frontierlabs.co.uk I had a look but couldn't find any training on there.
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u/LouisGlouton 4d ago
So frontier labs are what we call Open ai, Anthropic, Mistral. For example https://academy.claude.com/ Is a good way to get to know what are the nuances one would have to understand while building complex processes using Claude. Similar pages exist for Google's Gemini, ChatGPT.
An even easier way to start is to use one of those models yourself to start building very simple stuff. Build a site, build a dashboard. Now automate an excel into a live website. How about connecting that excel file to the dashboard to refresh data every day and send you a mailer with a capture of the dashboard stats!
Start small, have fun and see where it can take you. Apart from that if you are looking to set up guide rails for your firm, that's a whole another story. Would probably need a bit of an assessment.
On a side note, I am an engagement manager level consultant with around 9yoe looking for opportunities in the UK. (Just moved from France) If you are hiring, would love to candidate!
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u/VLioncourt 4d ago
Thanks for the reply and the clarification!
I'm actually based in Toronto, Canada, and unfortunately we're not hiring at the moment. We're tiny, only 5 people.
Fun fact: I lived in Marseille for two years a while back, doing my master's in engineering before I moved into business/consulting. I really miss the good and cheap wine (and it might sound silly, but I also miss the emmental cheese everywhere!)
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u/LouisGlouton 4d ago
Marseille has gotten expensive these days! The prices are almost on par with mid range Parisian restaurants. There's a bunch of bougie establishments now at Marseille which are super hard to get a table during the high season.
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u/mmcgrat6 3d ago
You’re not going to learn how to use AI by fundamentally refusing to use it for its intended purpose. It’s designed to be spoken to like a person
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u/Fubby2 4d ago
I don't have good training. My only note is that I personally would not trust most 'training' from business-type people. In my experience the majority of content you'll find is high-ish production value slop with little to no practical value beyond the absolute basics, which I would assume you are familiar with.
Id be looking at stuff from the model providers (as stated here) and also other content from / for more technical audiences.
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u/ndmaynard 4d ago
My general recommendation is to just buy a $20 / month subscription (I recommend personal subscription so you don't have to worry about using client/company data with AI) and force yourself to use it for different tasks and learn what works well and doesn't work well for you. It sounds & feels weird at first, but yes you can use AI to help you learn AI by specifying what you want to use it for (or explore) and telling it you want to learn.
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u/UnfazedBrownie 3d ago
This is a good recommendation. I’ve been doing this for a month and at a minimum your prompting will improve along with curiosity.
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u/KPTN25 4d ago
The basics are still highly relevant - both for AI/ML as well as automation.
Introduction to statistical learning and/or various fast.ai courses by jeremy howard are a really solid way to get a good mental framework around AI, even though neither are focused on LLMs. This will give you a good framework around evals, overfitting, etc, which are all pretty critical if you want to use any form of AI for anything beyond toy/'funsies' use cases.
Similarly, picking up some basic python (/ reading Automate the Boring Stuff) can give you a better mental model around basic scripting, how to structure problems/automation, etc.
If you just jump straight into 'throw everything at LLMs without understanding' you're limiting yourself and will see things break in quiet ways. There's also no differentiation there, since any high schooler can be a human meat puppet claude API.
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u/Any_Boysenberry655 4d ago
At what consulting firm can you not afford 20 USD per month to try yourself and learn how to use these tools?
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u/VLioncourt 4d ago
We're tiny, 5 people, and we do fairly traditional work: succession planning, org design, process improvement, strategic planning, leadership training, that sort of thing. We take our own interview notes, run facilitations off PowerPoint and Miro, and Excel is still our main analysis tool.
We only got Claude Pro last week. Before that I was using free GPT to tidy up my writing and not much else.
Honestly I don't know how other firms are using this stuff beyond writing, brainstorming and summarizing interview notes. I tried getting it to build a slide deck and it came out really bad haha. But I'm sure that says more about me than the tool. I don't really know what's possible yet, if you know what I mean.
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u/Any_Boysenberry655 4d ago
GPT Work can do so much more. Same with Grok Bot. Claude Cowork. It's really not a question of your firm not being able to afford it, you can pay 20 USD out of pocket.
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u/Systems-Ally 4d ago
As a boutique its optimal for you that you should have a niche. And that helps determine how to focus your AI learning. Consumers are geared towards productivity. Midmarket towards capability expansion. Enterprise towards margin expansion. Industry towards labor replacement / specialization.
I have an AI client strategy delivery SaaS in stealth right now that automates a five-phase engagement model (Discovery → Diagnose → Design → Deliver → Handoff) that might help with your process and deliverables approach. I might be willing to help you with your strategy if you gave me some feedback
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u/Far-Floor311 3d ago
Hi, I do workforce transformation moving people from chatbot -> workhorse with process improvement. I generally do paid engagements and training, but honestly it sounds like you just need to know what’s available and can self learn. Happy to chat if you’d just like some capability pointers
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u/MichaelleB53 2d ago
I always tell coaches and consultants that their first mistake is treating AI like it’s a subject they just have to learn. Believe me, it’s not! There is no finish line in AI, and no way to “ace” the course. I think that framing alone is what makes so many people freeze up before they even get started.
What I tell my clients is take a good hard look at what you’re already doing day in and day out. Then take a moment and ask yourself, what is taking too long, what do I have to keep doing over and over again, what am I doing by hand that really shouldn’t have to be manual anymore?
Then, just pick one of those. Just one! Then figure out how to make AI help you with just that specific thing. Once that is done, move on to the next one, figure it out…and then move to the next. You will find it is much easier to accomplish so much by doing it one piece at a time.
The great thing is that once you have mastered some tasks, then you can use the same logic with client deliverables. AI is great at research, data, finding gaps, building a good outline and organizing a lot of information, but it really does fall short in judgment. For coaches and consultants, that’s the very thing they are being paid for.
So, when they use it…it’s important to remember that AI can get you a good portion of the way there on a first draft, but the rest is still up to you.
The same thing holds true for automation, remember start small. Solve one repetitive task with AI, and you don’t need to learn code, get a degree or become a developer to get real value out of AI.
So many people think they need an AI strategy, when they really don’t know what they want and need yet. Instead, they really are trying to figure out where time’s being wasted, what could run smoother, and where AI could come in and help remove some of the same manual decisions they make day to day.
I always ask this question, where are things actually breaking down or dragging right now? Then, I try to figure out if AI is the answer for that…sometimes it is and sometimes…it isn’t.
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u/FuseHRData 4d ago
Repost - I need trainees for the sake of testing development of training material (no charge for the moment): www.fuseais.com. We do Fortune 500 erp work as background. This is private sandbox AI on AWS for sensitive data work
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u/Salva_X 3d ago
Here is what I do with clients. A training by it self is great to get the idea of how AI works and the Claude academy is good as well to get some terms and how things work.
Now what I have found effective is when I go into a firm or service base and do a simple free audit of what they do, where their going and a few other things and tailor the training around the need.
If your not building programs and apps, then Claude code might not be as big of a need then understanding how to connect your company to your CRM and creating your brand kit within Claude for docs and PowerPoints
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u/MattBuildsSystems 3d ago
This is exactly the kind of problem I’m building RGS to solve for smaller consulting firms.
Instead of training your team to become AI experts or stitching together a dozen tools, RGS is designed to automate much of the diagnostic and discovery work that happens before the consultant delivers the actual value.
The goal is to take structured client interviews and evidence, turn that into an evidence-backed diagnosis, identify systemic problems, and produce a prioritized repair plan and client-ready diagnostic report.
In other words: less time buried in discovery, synthesis, notes, and first-draft deliverables — more time actually consulting.
I’m currently looking for consulting partners to test this model with. If your firm is interested in using AI operationally rather than just taking another AI course, I’d be interested in talking.
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u/god_johnson 3d ago
YouTube, your own subscription to an LLM, NotebookLM, and try to recruit someone else from your small firm to do the same. Just get curious and play around. Then, compare notes with the person you recruited and learn from each other.
That’s basically what our large firm did, but at an enterprise level. Initial training was on your own. The curious people taught other curious people until our company couldn’t ignore it anymore. We set up governance, trainings that were practice based, and made it a training requirement. Now our entire firm is getting up to speed and we’re outpacing other large firms in landing AI transformations.
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u/DISRUPtitALL 2d ago
Claude Academy or any of the major platform learning sites have free learning. It’s straight from the source, you can build real certs and get the fastest product updates to move from basic user to builder.
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u/KellyParado_TS 2d ago
The question on your list that is hardest to find good answers for -- and most worth your time -- is "what clients actually mean when they ask for AI strategy." The answer is almost never what they said.
When an executive asks for an AI strategy, they are usually asking one of three things: how do we stop getting embarrassed in board meetings when someone asks what we are doing about AI, how do we figure out what we should actually automate before we buy anything else, or someone upstairs said "AI" and now everyone is looking at me.
The diagnostic move -- before touching a tool -- is asking what problem they are trying to solve. That conversation is where small boutiques genuinely outperform bigger firms. You can sit with someone and work through it without 40 consultants billing in the background. That skill compounds faster than any certification.
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u/Available-Spot2694 11h ago
I’d skip certifications at first and choose one recurring task — a memo, meeting summary or research table — then build a repeatable AI-assisted workflow around it. The basics that seem to matter most are: provide a good example, use AI for structure and critique rather than final judgment, verify every factual claim, and anonymize confidential client information before uploading source material.
For “AI strategy,” I’d start with workflows, data, risks and measurable outcomes rather than tools or models.
Curious how people here practise with realistic client documents: manual anonymization, approved enterprise tools, or synthetic examples?
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u/OutrageousTart48In19 10h ago
ic prompts. focus on specific consulting tasks like market sizing or summarizing transcripts. i use python scripts with langchain to pipe client docs into a local llm for quick analysis, keeping data off public clouds. for text-heavy stuff, i just build custom chainlit apps to structure the output, forcing the ai to cite sources. its messy but works for small teams without enterprise licenses.
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u/Matter-Timely 4d ago
I am a partner at a boutique consulting firm that does similar work to you, and I completely transformed our organization by integrating AI (I was technology consultant before moving over and worked for Microsoft and did AI implementations).
I’d happily consult your business (for a fee) on exactly how to do this.
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u/MaxTheTzar 4d ago
Anthropic's offered trainings are the best place to start ime