AI consulting or leadership training: which comes first?
Leadership training. Until the people who decide use AI in their own work, they lack the repertoire to choose priorities, assess proposals and hold any consultancy accountable for results. With a prepared board, the company knows what to ask for and can maintain what gets built.
A consultancy can map opportunities, design projects and implement solutions. But the people who approve the scope, choose between proposals and decide whether the result is good are on the board. If they have never used AI in their own work, they decide in the dark: they accept promises they can’t evaluate and don’t notice when a project solves the wrong problem.
The reverse order tends to leave three marks:
- pilots that operations don’t adopt, because no one in leadership can say what changes in the process;
- dependence on the vendor to maintain and adjust what was delivered;
- priorities set by whatever tool is available, not by the business.
With leadership prepared, consulting stops being a gamble. The board arrives with clear priorities, asks the right questions and knows how to hold the vendor to delivery. The guide What a CEO needs to know about generative AI gathers those questions.
Almai isn’t a technology consultancy: it works on training leadership. In the AI-First Executive Journey, the board maps and prioritizes where AI creates value and comes out with a method to maintain whatever it builds.
More questions before you hire
The best answer comes in a conversation.
Tell us what your leadership is trying to solve with AI. We’ll answer with your company in mind, not just any company.