With the proliferation of AI solutions, AI consulting is no longer a buzzword but a critical service that can redefine how SMBs operate, compete, and grow.

For marketing agency owners, this shift represents a golden opportunity—not only to harness AI internally but to guide clients through transformative strategies that deliver measurable results. As more companies seek to adopt AI technologies, they’re turning to trusted partners for AI strategy and implementation. That’s where you come in.

From automating lead generation to delivering hyper-personalized campaigns and predictive analytics, AI consulting services empower marketing agencies to move beyond execution and into strategic advisory roles. But offering these services goes far beyond understanding AI tools—it requires a clear framework, business insight, and a deep grasp of client pain points.

This guide will walk you through how to effectively launch and scale AI consulting services. You’ll learn what it takes to drive innovation for your SMB clients, the key benefits they’ll gain, and how to position your agency as a leader in this emerging space.

Table of Contents

• What Is AI Consulting?
• How to Tell if an SMB Needs AI Consulting?
• What Are the Top 6 Benefits of AI Consulting Services for Your Clients?
• What Are the Top 6 Challenges of AI Consulting?
• How to Measure AI Implementation Success
• Top Three AI Tools and Platforms to Master
• Future Trends in AI Consulting
• FAQs

What is AI Consulting?

For marketing agencies, offering AI consulting means acting as a trusted advisor who can guide clients through every phase of their AI journey:

1. AI Readiness Assessment

• Evaluate the client's current tech stack and data maturity.
• Identify specific marketing, sales, or support processes that can benefit from AI solutions.
• Determine feasibility, risks, and resource needs.

2. AI Strategy Development

• Craft a customized AI strategy aligned with the client’s marketing and business goals.
• Prioritize use cases by ROI, ease of implementation, and business value.
• Set a roadmap for short- and long-term AI adoption.

4. AI Tools and Vendor Selection

• Recommend the best AI platforms and AI tools based on client needs and budget.
• Help SMBs compare and evaluate custom AI solutions, no-code/low-code tools, and third-party platforms.
• Ensure alignment with business objectives, tech infrastructure, and scalability.

5. AI Implementation Planning

• Create a phased rollout plan for AI initiatives.
• Define success metrics (KPIs) and tracking methods.
• Coordinate cross-functional collaboration (e.g., marketing, IT, sales).

6. Change Management and Team Enablement

• Guide SMB teams through organizational and workflow changes.
• Train internal teams on how to use AI tools effectively.
• Ensure AI implementation complies with ethical standards and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA).

7. Performance Measurement and Optimization

• Help clients evaluate the ROI of AI investments.
• Recommend improvements or expansions based on early results.
• Offer ongoing consulting to optimize and evolve the AI strategy.

Ideally, as an AI consulting agency, you should help your SMB clients nail the customer journey automation:

How to Tell if an SMB Needs AI Consulting Services?

Not every small or medium-sized business (SMB) is ready to deploy cutting-edge AI tools, but many are closer than they think. As a marketing agency offering AI consulting services, it's essential to help clients identify whether they’re at a point where AI services can deliver real, measurable value.

Here are key indicators that an SMB is a strong candidate for AI consulting services:

1. They’re Drowning in Data but Lacking Insight

If your client is collecting large volumes of data (customer interactions, web analytics, email open rates, sales reports) but isn’t using it to drive decisions, it’s a strong sign that they could benefit from AI solutions.

An AI consultant can help them harness this data to unlock predictive insights, automate audience segmentation, and personalize outreach.

2. Manual Processes Are Slowing Them Down

Repetitive tasks—like sorting leads, responding to FAQs, or scheduling posts—are major time sinks. SMBs often don’t realize that intelligent automation can free up resources and reduce human error.

AI consulting firms can step in to evaluate processes and recommend smart AI implementation strategies, such as chatbots, AI-powered CRMs, or automated social media content creation and scheduling. 

3. Their Marketing Isn’t Scaling Efficiently

Many SMBs hit a ceiling with traditional marketing tactics. If your client’s growth has stalled despite spending more, they may need a more advanced AI strategy. Tools like predictive analytics, smart campaign optimization, and dynamic content personalization—advised and set up through AI consulting services—can help them scale without inflating budgets.

4. They’re Struggling to Compete with Larger Players

When SMBs are losing ground to larger competitors who use AI to offer faster service, better personalization, or smarter recommendations, it's time for a shift.

AI consulting services can level the playing field by guiding smaller businesses through the same transformative strategies—tailored to their scale and resources.

5. They’re Curious About AI But Don’t Know Where to Start

This is one of the most common (and overlooked) signals. Many SMB owners are aware of AI but are overwhelmed by the options and jargon. As a marketing agency, this is your chance to step in as a trusted advisor.

Offering AI consulting services helps demystify the space and ensures they make smart, strategic investments.

6. They’ve Tried AI Tools but Didn’t See Results

Maybe your client signed up for an AI-powered email tool or chatbot builder, but abandoned it after poor performance. Often, the issue isn’t the technology—it’s the lack of strategic alignment and proper setup.

AI consulting firms help fix this by auditing previous implementations and crafting a roadmap for success.

What Are the Top Six Benefits of AI Consulting Services for Your Clients?

Here are the top benefits your clients will experience when you offer professional AI consulting services:

1. Informed, Strategic Decision-Making

Many small and medium-sized businesses are data-rich but insight-poor. 

Through AI consulting, you help clients analyze and interpret their data more effectively, identifying patterns, predicting outcomes, and guiding smarter decisions. This empowers them to optimize everything from campaign budgets to customer engagement strategies. 

By integrating AI client reporting, marketing agencies can offer SMBs real-time visibility into their performance metrics, without the overwhelm. 

Intelligent client dashboards go beyond basic reporting by automatically surfacing key trends, anomalies, and actionable insights.

Whether it's identifying which campaigns are underperforming or forecasting future ad spend ROI, AI-powered analytics help clients make informed marketing decisions faster. 

As part of your AI consulting services, implementing and training clients on marketing analytics and dashboards positions your agency as a data-savvy partner that empowers smarter, more confident decision-making.

2. Improved Operational Efficiency

Repetitive and time-consuming tasks like customer service inquiries and social media content scheduling can be automated with AI.

With the right AI solutions in place, your clients can focus their time and resources on high-impact work. By advising on AI implementation, you help them streamline processes and reduce overhead.

Here is just one example of how an AI receptionist can boost an SMB’s efficiency in terms of handling customer inquiries and concerns: 

3. Personalized Customer Experiences at Scale

One of the most impactful benefits of AI services is hyper-personalization. AI-powered platforms can tailor content, product recommendations, and marketing messages to individual users in real-time.

As their AI consultant, you can help clients craft a personalization AI strategy that boosts conversions and loyalty without requiring massive teams.

4. Faster and Smarter Marketing Campaigns

With tools like predictive analytics, audience modeling, and automated A/B testing, AI enables faster campaign creation and optimization.

AI consulting firms can help clients deploy these tools efficiently, leading to better targeting, reduced ad spend waste, and improved ROI on every campaign.

5. Future-Proofing Their Business

AI is no longer a "nice-to-have." It's becoming essential.

By offering AI consulting services, you equip your clients with the tools and knowledge to remain competitive in their industry. Early adoption also means they’ll be better prepared for evolving trends in automation, customer behavior, and digital innovation.

6. Cost Savings Without Sacrificing Performance

AI helps businesses do more with less—whether it's through chatbot integration or predictive tools. 

With expert guidance on AI solutions, clients can reduce operating costs while still driving growth and delivering excellent service.

Here’s a formula to help assess the marketing automation ROI: 

What Are the Top Six Challenges of AI Consulting?

Here are some of the most common challenges marketing agencies face when delivering AI services to SMB clients:

1. Limited AI Awareness Among SMBs

Many SMBs are still behind on AI marketing trends or hold on to marketing myths. As a consultant, part of your job is education—helping clients understand how AI works, how marketing can drive real business results with AI, and AI vs human capabilities. 

Clients often expect instant results from AI solutions, not realizing that true transformation takes time, iteration, and refinement. As an AI consultant, it's your responsibility to set realistic expectations, outline milestones, and communicate the long-term value of strategic AI implementation.

2. Data Quality and Availability

AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. A major obstacle in AI implementation is that many SMBs either lack the volume of data required or have data that’s siloed, incomplete, or unstructured.

Helping clients improve their data hygiene and integrate their systems is often a necessary first step before a meaningful AI strategy can be executed.

3. Integration with Existing Tech Stack

Implementing AI tools or platforms isn’t always plug-and-play. Many SMBs operate with legacy systems or fragmented marketing AI tools that make integration difficult.

Part of your AI consulting services will involve assessing technical compatibility, recommending middleware or APIs, and ensuring that the new AI services work seamlessly with the client’s current setup.

4. Lack of Internal Expertise

Most SMBs don’t have data scientists or AI specialists on staff. This creates a dependency on external AI consulting firms—which is an opportunity for your agency, but it also means you need to explain AI concepts in plain language, provide hands-on training, and ensure the tools you recommend are user-friendly and scalable.

6. Cost Sensitivity

SMBs are often budget-conscious, and AI projects can seem intimidating from a cost perspective. A key challenge is showing clients that AI consulting doesn’t have to mean custom-built solutions or massive infrastructure changes.

By recommending affordable, low-code/no-code AI tools, and mapping out ROI, you can make AI both accessible and appealing.

Here is a handy AI cheat sheet to get you started on convincing clients about the benefits of AI adoption:

How to Measure AI Implementation Success

Here’s how to effectively measure the success of an AI strategy for your SMB clients.

Define Clear Objectives Before You Begin

Before implementing any AI solution, work with your client to define what success looks like. Is it higher lead conversion rates? Reduced response time via chatbots? More accurate customer segmentation? These goals should be SMART: 

Clear KPIs ensure that both your agency and the client are aligned from day one.

Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Each AI implementation should be tied to a set of performance metrics. Common KPIs to track include:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Definition: The total cost of acquiring a new customer, including ad spend, tools, and resources, divided by the number of new customers acquired. 

Why it matters: Effective AI automation can lower CAC by optimizing campaigns, improving targeting, and reducing wasted spend.

2. Lead Automation Metrics

When it comes to adopting AI tools to boost lead generation and nurturing, there are several metrics to keep in mind to measure lead automation success. 

Why it matters: Tracking lead automation metrics helps you gauge how well your AI tools are capturing, qualifying, and moving leads through the funnel.

3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Definition: The projected total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire relationship. 

Why it matters: Effective AI automation nurtures long-term relationships, improving retention and increasing CLTV.

4. Client Retention Rate

Definition: The percentage of existing customers who remain active clients over a specific time frame. 

Why it matters: AI automation can improve retention by delivering personalized experiences, timely follow-ups, and proactive support.

Top Three AI Tools and Platforms to Master

Here are the top AI tools and platforms every agency offering AI consulting should explore:

1. Vendasta

Vendasta offers a powerful white-label customer acquisition and engagement platform purpose-built for SMBs and the partners who support them, especially marketing agencies. With a comprehensive suite of AI solutions, Vendasta empowers agencies to manage the entire customer journey from awareness to retention. 

Key features:

• AI workforce that automates repetitive tasks across sales, marketing, and support.
• AI CRM to unify client data.
• AI-powered reputation management, advertising, social media, and email marketing—all integrated under one roof.
• Automation capabilities that eliminate the need for multiple disconnected platforms.

Here is a sneak peek into the top 10 reasons why Vendasta should be the top choice for any business interested in AI adoption:

For agencies involved in AI consulting, Vendasta simplifies how you deliver value to clients by combining their unique business data with automation and AI services that drive loyalty and lifetime value. It’s an ideal platform for building scalable, intelligent campaigns and marketing automation workflows tailored to SMBs. 

2. Zapier

As a no-code automation platform, Zapier acts as the “glue” that connects thousands of apps and tools, making it incredibly valuable for deploying AI solutions quickly and cost-effectively, especially for small and medium-sized business (SMB) clients with limited technical resources.

Zapier enables agencies to build powerful, automated workflows—known as Zaps—that integrate AI tools (like OpenAI, ChatGPT, or CRM scoring platforms) with everyday marketing and sales platforms such as HubSpot, Mailchimp, Google Ads, Slack, or Vendasta. 

Key features:

• Create automated workflows—called Zaps—between two or more apps without writing any code.
• Chain together multiple actions in one workflow (e.g., when a lead submits a form → send to CRM → enrich lead with AI → send custom email).
• Create logic-based branches in Zaps (like “if/then” rules).
• Add delays between actions or schedule Zaps to run at specific intervals.

3. SurferSEO

SurferSEO is a cloud-based SEO tool that uses AI and machine learning to analyze top-ranking pages for a specific keyword and provide on-page optimization recommendations. It enables marketing teams to create content that aligns with Google’s ranking factors.

Key features:

• Gives real-time, data-backed content suggestions (word count, structure, headings, keyword usage) while your team writes.
• Analyzes the top-ranking pages for any keyword, identifying ranking signals like keyword density, backlinks, page speed, and more.
• Finds relevant, high-opportunity keywords based on search volume, difficulty, and related terms.
• Audits existing content and suggests specific optimizations to improve rankings.

Future Trends in AI Consulting

Understanding emerging trends helps you deliver forward-thinking AI strategies to your SMB clients and position your agency as a leader in innovation.

Hyper-Personalization Powered by Real-Time Data

Tomorrow’s AI will go beyond general personalization to deliver hyper-personalized experiences—tailored content, offers, and messaging in real time based on user behavior, preferences, and predictive modeling.

Marketing agencies that integrate AI tools capable of real-time data processing will empower clients to engage audiences with unprecedented precision.

Low-Code/No-Code AI Solutions

The rise of low-code and no-code platforms will make AI implementation accessible to even the most non-technical SMBs.

As an AI consultant, you’ll play a key role in helping clients identify, configure, and deploy these tools efficiently—minimizing development time while maximizing value.

Increased Demand for Ethical and Explainable AI

As AI adoption grows, so does scrutiny. Clients will be more concerned with ethical AI use, data privacy, and algorithm transparency.

Expect a greater focus on explainable AI, where models provide clear reasoning for decisions, and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. AI consulting firms will need to advise on both technology and governance.

Integrated AI Platforms Will Replace Fragmented Tool Stacks

SMBs are growing tired of juggling disconnected tools. The next wave of AI solutions will be unified, intelligent platforms that manage data, campaigns, analytics, and engagement in one place.

Agencies will need to recommend and integrate platforms—like Vendasta—that combine AI automation with end-to-end customer lifecycle management.

AI Strategy as an Ongoing Advisory Relationship

Instead of one-off projects, SMBs will seek long-term AI consulting partnerships that evolve with their growth. This means that client agency relationships and effective client communication will become increasingly important.

Partnerships open up recurring revenue models for agencies, such as monthly AI performance audits, strategy updates, and continuous optimization services.

Unlock the Future of Marketing with AI Consulting

By offering AI consulting services, you’re not just helping clients keep up—you’re helping them leap ahead. From strategy development and implementation to automation and optimization, your agency can be the trusted partner SMBs need to navigate the AI era with confidence.

But to truly scale your impact and streamline your delivery, you need the right tools behind you. That’s where Vendasta comes in.

As a fully white-label, AI-powered platform built specifically for SMB-focused agencies, Vendasta empowers you to automate lead generation, enhance client engagement, and deliver measurable results—without managing multiple disjointed systems.

Ready to future-proof your agency and deliver AI solutions that truly move the needle? Request a free demo with Vendasta today and discover how our platform can help you scale your AI consulting services, attract more clients, and drive lasting innovation for the businesses you serve. 

FAQs about AI Consulting Services

1. How Much Do AI Consulting Services Cost?

The cost of AI consulting services can vary widely depending on the scope, complexity, and level of expertise required. On average, pricing can range from $5.000 to $15.000 per project for SMBs. Some AI consulting firms offer hourly rates, typically between $200 and $350 per hour.

For marketing agencies offering AI services, a lean entry point might include one-time strategy workshops, data audits, or tool implementation for as little as $1,000 to $5,000. 

2. What is the 10-20-70 Rule for AI?

The 10-20-70 rule is a widely recognized framework in AI consulting that outlines how organizations should allocate their focus and investment when adopting AI solutions:

• 10% on Algorithms: Actual AI models or machine learning algorithms used in the solution. 
• 20% on Technology Infrastructure: Tools, platforms, and systems (like data warehouses, APIs, and AI platforms) needed to support AI implementation. 
• 70% on Business Process Transformation: The largest investment should go into rethinking and redesigning the workflows, teams, and strategies needed to integrate AI into daily operations.

3. What Advantages do AI Consulting Firms Offer?

AI consulting firms empower SMBs to move beyond hype and unlock real, measurable value from AI with the help of strategic clarity, faster execution, access to expert knowledge, change management support, and ongoing optimization and ROI tracking.

This article was originally published in June 2024 and was updated in April 2025 to include the latest information and insights.