AI Consultancy vs DIY: When to Hire

You've watched the YouTube tutorials. You've got a ChatGPT subscription. You've even built a Zapier automation or two. So why would you pay someone to help with AI when you could just figure it out yourself?

It's a fair question — and one we hear every week at Blue Canvas. Honestly, for some businesses, DIY is the right call. But for plenty of others, it's costing them more than they realise. Not in subscription fees — in time, missed opportunities, and half-built systems that never quite deliver.

Here's how to decide whether you need an AI consultancy or whether you're better off going it alone.

When DIY Works

Let's give credit where it's due. There are situations where doing it yourself makes total sense:

• You're a solo operator or tiny team — If it's just you and maybe one other person, the overhead of bringing in a consultant might not make sense yet. Start with ChatGPT, learn the basics, and see what sticks.
• You're technically minded — If you've got a background in tech, data, or engineering, you can probably pick up AI tools faster than most. You'll know when you've hit your limits.
• Your use case is simple — Need AI to help write emails, summarise documents, or brainstorm ideas? You don't need a consultant for that. Just use the tool.
• You're in exploration mode — Sometimes you need to play around with tools before you even know what questions to ask. That's fine. Experiment first, then get help when you're ready to scale.

If any of these describe you, crack on. There's nothing wrong with starting solo. In fact, the best consulting clients we work with did exactly that before coming to us.

When DIY Costs You More

Here's where it gets interesting. The hidden cost of DIY AI isn't the monthly fees — it's everything else:

The time trap

Most business owners we talk to have spent 50–100 hours "trying out AI tools" over the past year. That's two to three full working weeks. If those hours had been spent on revenue-generating work, the opportunity cost is massive. A good consultant can compress months of experimentation into days — because they've already made the mistakes you're about to make.

Tool sprawl

Without guidance, it's easy to end up with five different AI subscriptions, three automation platforms, and none of them talking to each other. We've seen businesses spending £200–400/month on AI tools they barely use. A consultant helps you pick the right stack and actually integrate it — so the tools work together instead of sitting in separate tabs.

The 80% problem

You build an automation that works 80% of the time. Brilliant. But the other 20% causes errors, needs manual fixing, or just breaks silently. That last 20% is where the real expertise lies, and it's exactly where most DIY efforts stall. It's the difference between a demo and a system you can rely on.

No one to challenge your thinking

When you're doing it alone, you only know what you know. An experienced AI consultant has seen dozens of businesses and hundreds of use cases. They'll spot opportunities you'd never think of — and more importantly, they'll steer you away from dead ends before you waste weeks on them.