How to brief an AI consultant so the first month isn't wasted

The first month of an AI consulting engagement often gets spent on discovery that could have happened before the engagement even started, and the difference between a fast, focused start and a slow, exploratory one usually traces back to how much the client had actually documented before the first call, not to anything the consultant did differently.

A useful brief doesn't require technical sophistication from the client, it requires specificity: what does the current process actually look like, step by step, who does it, how often, what breaks or goes wrong when it's done manually, and what would a good outcome actually look like in numbers, not in adjectives like "better" or "faster."

Clients worried they don't know enough to write a useful brief usually have more than they think: a rough process description, even an imperfect one, and a few examples of what's currently going wrong give a consultant something concrete to react to and correct, which is faster than starting from nothing and building the whole picture from scratch in the first meetings.

The engagements that move fastest aren't the ones with the most sophisticated clients, they're the ones where someone took an hour before the first call to actually write down what's happening today, in plain language, rather than relying on the consultant to extract it live, one question at a time.