This year I added four new roles to my team and brought in a handful of expert advisors. The whole thing cost me about $240.

That’s not a typo. But the team might not be what you’re picturing. The roles are filled by AI tools. I now have a researcher who never sleeps, a math genius data analyst, a tireless proofreader, and a design assistant who doesn’t charge for revisions. My expert advisors have been built with custom prompts to push back on me from different vantage points. It’s like brainstorming with four of my best bosses and thought partners at any given time.

As a solopreneur, I could never have afforded a full staff and expert advisors. Now, for $240 a year, I have access to capabilities that once would have required both. For the first time in twenty years of running a small practice, I’ve had the time to think deeply about my own business while still delivering on my commitments to clients.

My experience is one example of something much bigger happening across impact consulting and all of mission-driven work for that matter. Many of you may be living a version of it yourselves. Like me, you may not always know how to feel about the AI transition, but regardless of how you feel, it is changing the economics of the field. The change is impacting global firms and one-person practices alike.

Scale isn’t what it used to be

The largest consulting firms in the world built their fortunes on a simple arrangement. Their clients paid for hours, and most of those hours belonged to junior people doing research, building decks, and crunching numbers overseen from a distance by a senior-level partner.

For most of my career, being a small consulting practice came with a tradeoff. Clients got senior-level attention, deep expertise, and a close relationship with the person actually doing the work. But small firms like mine couldn’t match the research, analytical, and production capacity of a large team.

AI is changing that equation.

It doesn’t give me everything that a large firm has. But it gives me access to capabilities that used to require scale. And that means small firms can compete for work, tackle questions, and deliver at a level that would have required a much larger team not very long ago.

And here’s the thing I find most hopeful: the things AI makes cheaper aren’t the things that make a great consultant great.

AI doesn’t eliminate a consultant’s value, it reveals it.

For a long time, consulting has put a lot of value on the things we can see and count. The research. The deck. The report. The hours it took a team to produce them.

AI is making many of those things dramatically faster and cheaper. And I think that is forcing us to confront something we should have understood all along: those things were never where the greatest value of a good consultant lived.

The deliverable matters. But the real value is knowing which questions to ask before the research starts. It’s discerning what matters and what doesn’t. It’s recognizing when a “right” answer on paper will never work in the real world.

And it’s the even harder-to-measure things. Trust. Presence. Judgment. The ability to read a room. The credibility to challenge someone who hired you. Knowing when to push and when to listen.

We may have overindexed on the visible artifacts of consulting because they were easier to package and price. As AI makes those artifacts cheaper and easier to produce, it makes the value of the human element clearer than ever. The judgment behind a recommendation. The trust required to act on it. The presence needed to make change happen.

Why this matters more in our sector

In mission-driven work, this matters more than it does almost anywhere else.

The organizations I serve aren’t buying slides. They’re navigating funding cuts they didn’t see coming, staff running on empty, competing priorities, and decisions with no clean answer. What they need is someone who has lived this work. Someone who cares deeply.

AI can draft the memo about the hard conversation. It cannot have the hard conversation. It can summarize a strategy. It cannot be trusted by a wary board, realign the room when a conversation goes sideways, or understand the history of why the last reorganization failed.

For twenty years, the parts of this work that drained me were the parts that pulled me away from thinking strategically and focusing on relationships. I spent too much time on late-night research, polishing a deck, or writing a  document no one would remember. AI gives some of that time back.

And that’s what excites me about this moment. Not that I can produce more slides or reports with fewer people. It’s that a small practice like mine can gain enormous new capacity while putting more of my energy toward the work that matters.

Careful should not be the same as frozen

I won’t pretend this is simple ground for our sector, because it isn’t. We have real reasons to be careful. Client information is not ours to feed into a machine, and of course we can’t forget the environmental impacts. The communities we work with have already been on the wrong end of biased systems. And we do work that should never feel automated or hollow.

That wariness is deserved, and I share it. But careful cannot become frozen. We have to hold the opportunity and the risk at the same time. Use the leverage without surrendering humanity.

For a long time, doing this work well at a small scale meant accepting the limits of being small. I couldn’t have a research team, an analyst, a designer, and a room full of advisors. So I did as much as I could myself, or I went without.

That constraint is lifting.

That’s why, underneath all the unease, I keep landing somewhere hopeful. AI isn’t making the human part of this work obsolete. AI is teaching us about the real value of consulting and giving small practices more capacity to build around it.

For those of us who chose this work because we wanted to help organizations solve hard problems and make a difference, that may turn out to be a very big deal.

P.S. The pricing question is the one I get asked most. I can send you free resources such as The Social Impact Consultant Pricing Guide to help mission-driven solopreneurs charge for judgment instead of hours: Contact