Over this playbook we’ll be focusing on how to carve out your space in the growing AI expert market.

Hopefully the last Part helped whet your appetite about the opportunity that is opening up right now. Now we’ll get into the nitty gritty of becoming an AI expert.

Let’s get started:

First up you need to know your stuff.

The world doesn’t need more clueless consultants. There are too many already!

At the same time you do not need a PhD level understanding. In fact this can be a hinderance!

My mum runs a charity helping asylum-seeking mums get help throughout pregnancy and then bringing their kids up here in the UK.

Her charity had some very fancy AI consulting from KPMG including one talk from a highly lauded “expert” who’s been working in AI for decades.

All the accolades, all the qualifications.

Utterly valueless.

Being at that lofty level of knowledge detaches you from the reality of what your clients need.

He was telling them about neural networks and how generative AI works when what they needed was to know how to use AI in their organisation.

Too abstract, too high level. And without any practical value.

What’s the balance?

This doesn’t mean we should remain ignorant about AI.

I’d recommend at least taking some basic-intermediate courses on “abstract” topics from https://www.deeplearning.ai/

The courses there are free and excellent.

In particular:

• AI for everyone

• Generative AI for everyone

These are two excellent beginner level courses to get you started. From there you can explore their whole catalogue.

More importantly though we don’t need to go down a deep rabbit hole here. You don’t need to become a coder to consult. That’s absolutely one route but it is not for everyone.

Instead I’d recommend meeting businesses where they are and solving their problems using AI.

We’ll do this by combining skills & knowledge:

• our AI skills & knowledge

• our niche industry skills & knowledge

• our project based skills & knowledge

We want to find the sweet spot between these three and carve out our AI expert business here.

An example will be most instructive.

Sweet spot

I personally focus my teaching, consulting, workshops, advisory and implementation business in the digital marketing realm.

This is my domain - this is what I know about. Landing pages, copywriting, sales funnels, advertising etc. etc.

I combine this with my knowledge of AI. This I’ve built over the last couple of years by obsessively testing out new releases, researching, reading and (importantly for me!) writing about the use of AI.

That’s enough for me to generally talk about marketing and AI. And this is where a lot of consultants are happy to operate.

It’s also why a lot of consultant advice is rubbish. Sorry guys.

We want to go a step further and layer in experience. This comes in the shape of the projects we do.

I shouldn’t go and consult for a company and tell them to use AI to optimise their Facebook ads until I have (you guessed it…) used AI to optimise Facebook ads.

Do the thing. Then go do the thing for other people.

This will give you the edge as someone who actually knows what they are doing. Rather than just sounding like you know what you are doing.

What projects?

OK but what projects should you pursue for your own experience?

Start with what your industry needs.

Want to focus on the marketing departments? Cool - what problems do they have day to day?

Writing out countless copy for ads? Great. Get good at using AI for ad copy, get results and then go and do it for other people.

Preparing SEO optimised blog articles? No problem - optimise a blog using AI yourself. Rank it, get traffic. Learn and prove you can do it for others.

Generating faceless videos for TikTok? Build a channel with this technique to 100k followers then go show companies how you can do it for them too.

This sounds like common sense. But it is NOT how most expert consultants work.

FYI if you are looking for a (I think) good broad set of guides to deploy AI project then my Playbook Vault (available as part of the Forge — Lifetime Pass) is a solid place to start. It’s now 50+ guides, here are just a few:

Choose one you’ll know will be valuable in your industry and follow it through yourself first. If you have a Lifetime membership ($197) you already have access to this and a lot more.

Alternatively YouTube is an absolute treasure trove of guides.

For example plug in a search term like “AI for facebook ads” and there are tonnes of videos like this:

Learn what others are doing. Consume it all.

Apply it yourself. Get results.

Then spin it into a consulting offer. Showing others how to do it too.

This sounds simple. And it is. But it requires a focus that most consultants don’t bother to cultivate. This will be crucial moving forward.

We aren’t competing with the McKinsey’s and KPMGs who provide general consultation. We’re instead going to focus and carve out a powerful specialisation for ourself. We want to be the go-to for our expertise.

In the next Part we’ll look at how we start to build our reputation even before we’ve launched our consultancy.

For now just work out your niche and pick a couple of projects you believe will valuable in that industry. Then check my Vault and other sources for ready-made guides.