Generative AI is the reason AI consulting became relevant to ordinary businesses. Before it, AI was mostly for companies with a data science team and a lot of structured data. After it, any business with a pile of invoices, quotes, orders or emails has something worth automating.
What it means in plain terms
Generative AI refers to models that work with language. They can read a document and pull out what matters. They can write a draft from a set of facts, summarise a long thread, or find the relevant passage in a pile of records.
That is exactly the shape of most office admin. Read this, type it in there. Look up that, write a reply. Find the document that says what we agreed. Until recently none of it was automatable, because it involved reading and judgement. Now the reading can be automated and the judgement can be left with a person.
What generative AI consulting involves
Finding the document heavy work in your business that consumes the most hours. Working out which of it is consistent enough to automate reliably. Building the automation against your real systems and testing it against your own history. You know the error rate before it goes live. Designing the queue for the things it is not sure about.
Then teaching someone in your business to run it.
Where it works well
Reading inbound documents and putting the data in the right place. Invoices, orders, delivery dockets, claims.
Drafting from your own history. Quotes, proposals, customer replies, reports, in your voice and your template, for a person to approve.
Answering questions from your own records. Procedures, past jobs, pricing precedents, contract terms, with the source cited.
Checking one document against another. A subcontractor claim against the contract. A supplier invoice against the purchase order.
Where it does not
Anything where the inputs are chaotic and the volume is low. The setup cost will not pay back.
Anything where a mistake is catastrophic and cannot be caught by a human review step. Generative AI is probabilistic. It proposes, and a person decides.
Anything a well built product already does for a monthly fee.
Do you need it
Ask who in your business spends most of their week reading things and typing them somewhere else. Or who writes the same kind of document over and over. If you can name them, you probably do. If you cannot, you probably do not yet.