AI consulting scams and how they work

Very little of this is fraud in the legal sense, which is exactly why it persists. Most of it is selling something with low value at a price that implies high value, and it is easier to spot once you know the shapes.

The resold subscription

You pay a substantial fee for an AI solution. What is delivered is an off-the-shelf tool with your logo on the login screen, configured over an afternoon, on a subscription the supplier pays a fraction of and bills you a multiple of.

Nothing here is illegal and there is a legitimate version of it: someone selecting the right tool, configuring it properly, and running it for you has genuinely done work. The scam version is the markup without the work, and the tell is that they will not tell you what the underlying product is. Ask directly which platforms this is built on. A straight answer is normal; evasion is the finding.

The endless pilot

The engagement starts as a small proof of concept, which is sensible. Then the pilot needs another phase to be conclusive, and another to handle the edge cases, and eighteen months later nothing has reached production and each phase was individually reasonable.

This is the most expensive pattern in the category because it never triggers alarm. The protection is structural: agree at the start what the pilot has to demonstrate to proceed and what result would mean stopping. If nobody will define a failure condition, the pilot cannot fail, which means it cannot end.

The deck with no diagnosis underneath

You receive a polished document about AI opportunities in your sector. It is well written, generically true, and could be sent to any company like yours with the name changed.

The test is specificity. Does it name your processes, your systems, your volumes? Does it rank anything, with values attached? Could a competent third party build from it? A document that fails all three took a day to produce and is priced as though it took a month. What a real deliverable contains.

The proprietary framework

Everything is delivered through a named methodology with capitalized stages, and the methodology is described as the reason the fee is what it is.

Some frameworks are useful shorthand for a real process. The warning sign is when the framework is the product rather than a description of the work, and particularly when it is used to explain why you cannot have the underlying detail. If the prompts and configuration are withheld as proprietary methodology, you are being told the thing running your business is not yours.

The credential that means nothing

Certifications from bodies that exist to sell certifications. Partner badges that require a fee and a form. Awards from publications that sell awards.

None of these are evidence of competence, and they cluster on the websites of firms with nothing else to show. What counts is a working thing you can see and somebody who will talk about their failures in detail. How to check a track record when NDAs hide the actual work.

The borrowed portfolio

Case studies that describe work done by people no longer at the firm, or by a previous employer, or by a partner. Occasionally work the firm was adjacent to rather than responsible for.

The question that resolves it: who specifically did this, are they still here, and will they be on my project? Then put the names in the agreement.

Two adjacent things that are not scams

Worth separating, because suspicion aimed at the wrong target costs you good suppliers.

Being new is not a scam. A firm with a short history can be entirely competent, and the correct response is to weight demonstration over claims rather than to disqualify them. We are new, so treat that as self-interested and also true.

Using off-the-shelf components is not a scam either. Almost all good work in this field assembles existing pieces, and a supplier building everything from scratch is usually making a mistake, not demonstrating rigor. What matters is whether the assembly and the judgment about your business were real.

The one question that filters most of this

Ask what it would take for them to tell you not to proceed.

Real practitioners answer immediately, because they have done it: the process was broken, the frequency was too low, the exception rate made it a bad candidate, the client's data was in no state for it. Somebody selling a product with a consulting wrapper cannot answer, because there is no version of the conversation where they walk away.

If you want the wider list of warning signs, including three that apply to us, the red flags. Our own arrangement is on the consulting page, and the part that matters for this page is that the roadmap is yours to take elsewhere.