Most organisations in Australia now have AI pilots and budgets that are getting tighter with more pressure to show results. In KPMG's latest AI Pulse survey, 69% of Australian organisations say AI is delivering meaningful business value, but only 2% say their adoption has progressed to established ROI. The question has moved from whether to use AI to where AI will take cost out in the short term, and who can help you go from proof-of-concept to scale in the business. There are a lot of firms offering to help, from the global majors to specialists and independent studios. Picking the right partner is more important than ever.
These are the questions I'd ask before hiring any AI consultancy, including us.
Start with what you need them to do
AI work comes in four kinds, and firms are usually strongest at one or two. Strategy decides where AI should take the business and in what order. Design works out how customers, people, processes and systems change. Build and integration gets solutions working inside your technology and data. Governance sets the pace, risk appetite and controls to ensure programmes are set up for success.
Be clear which of these you're buying first. A firm that's excellent at building agents may be the wrong choice when you don't yet know which problems are worth solving, and a strategy firm with no delivery depth can leave you with a roadmap nobody can execute.
Ten questions to ask
- Who will actually do the work? Ask for the named people, their experience and how much of their time you get. The senior people who pitch are not always the ones who deliver.
- What have you put into production? Ask for work that is running today, the measure it moved and a client you can call. Demonstrations and pilots are easy. Production is the hard part.
- How will we know it's paying back? A good firm agrees the baseline, the owner and the measure for each initiative before the work starts, and says what happens to a pilot that doesn't meet it. In EY-Parthenon's 2026 CEO Outlook Survey, 42% of respondents said they can't reliably measure their AI costs or the return on their AI spending.
- How do you create the scope of work? In our experience, working out how AI should change the way you serve customers, and how the business runs behind that, starts with your current customer experience and your business strategy. Technology and scope choices follow from the strategy. Discovery and planning focused on creating your business requirements, independent of technology, is essential to making good technology choices.
- Are you independent of technology vendors? Ask which vendors they partner with, resell or are paid by, and how that shapes what they recommend. A firm can be a good partner and still have a preferred platform. You should know.
- Who can build what you design? Ask whether the solution will be specified so any builder or partner, including the ones you already use, can deliver it.
- What happens after the strategy? Ask who carries the work into delivery, how the design is held through it, and how the benefits are tracked through launch and scale.
- Who owns what you produce? Code, prompts, models, evaluations, data and documents. Settle it before the work starts, along with what it costs to run once the firm has gone.
- How do you handle data, privacy and risk? Ask how they approach privacy, security and responsible use, and how their work lines up with the Australian Government's guidance on safe and responsible AI.
- What does the first engagement cost, and what do we have at the end? A fixed-price first step with a clear output lets you test the relationship before you commit to a programme.
Large firm, specialist or independent studio?
Large firms bring scale, which helps when a programme spans many business units, systems and countries, and when you need a big delivery team. Specialists in data and engineering are strong when the problem is mostly technical and the use case is already clear. Independent studios give you senior people directly and tend to move faster, which suits work where the strategy and design still need shaping.
Most organisations end up using more than one. Writing in Harvard Business Review in October 2026, Justine Hastings, Chad Syverson and Seth Zimmerman put the missing productivity gains down to AI tools that improve work within individual functions and miss the work that runs across them. What matters is that someone holds the strategy, the design and the delivery together, so the work that's built is the work that was decided. The right partner may not do everything, but they should be accountable for making sure everything happens. That means bringing in the right partners for what they don't do, and managing them well.
Signs to slow down
- The proposal leads with a platform or a tool before anyone has asked about your customers.
- The firm partners with or resells particular technologies, so the solution is often chosen before the problem is understood.
- There is no discovery process to determine what the scope or programme needs to be.
- The scope covers one function's tools, with no view of how work moves across the business.
How we answer these questions
We're Imagineers, a strategic design and AI studio working across Australia and New Zealand, in person and remotely. The people you meet are the people who do the work. We're independent of every technology vendor, and we specify each solution so any builder or partner can deliver it.
We take a design-led and customer-led approach to the way we work. Our model is to unite senior independent talent across different disciplines - senior strategists, researchers, technologists, strategic designers and commercial leaders - to work collaboratively with you and your teams to deliver results. We start with your customers and how your business serves them today, then reimagine and redesign how it could do it in the future. That enables us to define what the work looks like to transform your business from today to tomorrow, and set a clear strategy for where to play, how to win, and how to measure success.
Most clients start with our AI Strategy to Delivery Roadmap: a fixed-price engagement, AUD $15,000 excluding GST, run through workshops with your leaders and teams. It ends in a portfolio of initiatives and the roadmap to deliver it. If you'd like to talk it through, book thirty minutes and we'll bounce some ideas around.