Who is actually worth
listening to in AI consulting

Thirteen editorial profiles of the people shaping how businesses adopt AI — what they built, what they publish, and what is genuinely being said about them. Every claim links to its source. Plus free tools to build your own business case first.

Read the profiles What it costs in 2026

Three guides worth reading before you hire anyone

Sourced and dated. Written for the person signing the invoice.

How to choose an AI consultant

Seven questions that separate a consultant who will ship something from one who will sell you a strategy deck. Written for a business owner, not a CTO.

Read the guide →

What AI consulting costs in 2026

Published rates, what the numbers actually mean, and why almost every figure you will find online was written by someone selling the service.

Read the guide →

What an AI consultant actually does

The four distinct jobs sold under one label — and how hiring the wrong one is the most common and most expensive mistake.

Read the guide →

Thirteen people and programmes worth knowing about

Researchers, educators, operators and one paid training programme. Each profile covers what they are known for, what they have actually published or shipped, and what the public record says about them — including criticism, where it exists.

Showing 13 profiles

AN
Andrew Ng
Founder, DeepLearning.AI · Managing General Partner, AI Fund · CEO, Landing AI

Runs DeepLearning.AI, AI Fund and Landing AI at once, chairs Coursera, sits on Amazon’s board — and argues publicly against the AI-extinction framing.

AI StrategyEducationMentor
Read the profile →
EM
Ethan Mollick
Professor at the Wharton School · Author of Co-Intelligence · Writes One Useful Thing

The Wharton professor who publishes the experiment, including when it fails. Reviewers call the book practical; some call its conclusions idealistic.

AI StrategyEducationAuthor
Read the profile →
PR
Paul Roetzer
Founder & CEO, Marketing AI Institute and SmarterX · Host, The Artificial Intelligence Show

Started on marketing-and-AI in 2016, years before it was obvious. A translator for executives, not a technologist — and clear about it.

AI StrategyMarketingMentor
Read the profile →
CP
Christopher S. Penn
Co-founder & Chief Data Scientist, Trust Insights · Co-host, Marketing Over Coffee

A practising data scientist who publishes the prompt and the method, not just the conclusion. Eight-time IBM Champion in Data and AI.

AnalyticsMarketingAI Tools
Read the profile →
DF
Daniel Faggella
Founder & Head of Research, Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research

Enterprise AI ROI research built on 1,500+ interviews — plus a separate philosophical project on what should succeed humanity.

AI StrategyEnterpriseResearch
Read the profile →
JO
Jeremiah Owyang
General Partner, Blitzscaling Ventures · Host, Llama Lounge

Analyst turned AI investor. We corrected our own entry on him: two claims we could not source have been removed.

AI StrategyVentureCommunity
Read the profile →
GI
Greg Isenberg
CEO, Late Checkout · Former advisor to Reddit and TikTok

Advised TikTok and Reddit, sold companies to WeWork and StumbleUpon. Not an implementation consultant — an idea source.

AI StrategyCommunityProduct
Read the profile →
MW
Matt Wolfe
Creator of FutureTools.io · Co-host, The Next Wave

Curates FutureTools and one of the largest AI YouTube channels. We removed the superlative we could not source.

AI ToolsAutomationMedia
Read the profile →
AF
Alex Finn
Founder & CEO, Henry Intelligent Machines and Creator Buddy · OpenClaw power user

Runs a multi-agent company from local hardware. The frontier of what agents can do — not a plan a small business should copy.

OpenClawAgentsVibe Coding
Read the profile →
NS
Nick Saraev
Founder, Maker School · Make.com and n8n automation educator

Build-alongs rather than motivation. Every income figure attached to his name is self-reported — we label them all.

AutomationNo-codeMake.com
Read the profile →
EB
Erik Bledsoe
Founder, Rock Castle AI · Adjunct Graduate Professor of AI & Entrepreneurship, Lipscomb University

Teaches AI and entrepreneurship at Lipscomb; runs Rock Castle AI. Two headline revenue figures we could not verify.

AIOSSMBMentor
Read the profile →
CK
Cassie Kozyrkov
Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist · Founder of Decision Intelligence

Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist. Starts from the decision you are trying to make, not the technology — which kills a lot of bad projects early.

Decision ScienceAI StrategyEnterprise
Read the profile →
TD
Thomas H. Davenport
Distinguished Professor, Babson College · Fellow, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

Made analytics a boardroom subject in 2006. Babson professor, MIT fellow, 25 books — patterns across many firms, not one operator generalising.

EnterpriseAI StrategyResearch
Read the profile →
RB
Reid Blackman
Founder & CEO, Virtue · Author of Ethical Machines (HBR Press)

Philosophy professor turned AI ethical-risk consultant. Advised the Canadian government and EY. Sceptical of ethics-as-marketing.

AI GovernanceRiskEnterprise
Read the profile →
RC
Rumman Chowdhury
CEO, Humane Intelligence · First U.S. Science Envoy for Artificial Intelligence

Ran the industry’s first algorithmic bias bounty at Twitter. First U.S. Science Envoy for AI. Read her if your model decides things about people.

AI GovernanceAuditingResearch
Read the profile →
HH
Hamel Husain
Founder, Parlance Labs · Independent LLM consultant · formerly GitHub and Airbnb

The antidote to shipping on vibe checks. Ex-GitHub and Airbnb; his material tells you what to demand from whoever you hire.

ImplementationEvalsLLM
Read the profile →
CH
Chip Huyen
Author of AI Engineering and Designing Machine Learning Systems

Wrote the two books engineers actually keep on the desk. The fastest way for a buyer to learn enough to ask a vendor hard questions.

ImplementationML SystemsAuthor
Read the profile →
AM
Allie K. Miller
CEO, Open Machine · formerly Global Head of ML for Startups & VC at AWS

Ex-AWS head of ML for startups. Excellent translator for executives — but audience size measures distribution, not implementation skill.

AI StrategyEnterpriseEducation
Read the profile →
AA
Azeem Azhar
Founder, Exponential View · Executive Fellow, Harvard Business School

Works one level up: what a technology does to an industry’s economics over years. Pair him with a practitioner.

AI StrategyResearchEnterprise
Read the profile →
JL
Jason Liu
Independent consultant · Creator of the Instructor library · formerly Meta and Stitch Fix

Specialises in retrieval — the most common way company AI quietly disappoints. His open-source library is a firmer credential than a client list.

ImplementationRAGLLM
Read the profile →

Build the business case before you hire

Eight free calculators — ROI, readiness, risk, skills gaps, vendor comparison. No sign-up, nothing stored, and they run in your browser. Walk into a discovery call with your own numbers.

All eight live at AIOSFinder.com — free, no account.

Working AI consultant taking on clients?

We are opening a small number of listings for consultants who are actively selling to businesses. Identity verified against public registers, written consent required, paid placement disclosed on every card. No ratings, no stars, no invented social proof — ever.

How a listing works →