How to choose an AI consultant: the show-me list
How to choose an AI consultant: ask for four things before you pay - a client you can phone, a system in production, a named builder, exit terms.
Angus McDonald · 20 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
written for Australia ● also for United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand
The Azgard Show-Me List is four things to ask an AI consultant to produce before you pay them: a client you can phone by name, a system in production you can watch a non-employee use, the name of the person who will do your work, and a written answer to what you keep if you stop paying. Answers about methodology are free. Only the four artefacts are checkable, and a consultant who has none is billing you to learn.
Why most checklists for choosing an AI consultant test the wrong thing
Most checklists for choosing an AI consultant test what the consultant says: methodology, frameworks, change management. Those are answers, and answers are free. A market that selects on answers selects for whoever answers most fluently - the one skill every consultant can borrow from the product they sell.
The questions that work are the ones whose answers existed before you asked. An Australian buyer in Azgard's harvest named the fear: "Biggest fear is paying for fancy roadmap deck or some 'agent' nobody uses after 2 months."
The Azgard Show-Me List: four things to ask an AI consultant to produce
The Azgard Show-Me List runs in the order below. Each item exists or it does not.
| Ask them to produce | What it proves | A weak answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1. A named client you can contact | The work happened, and an outsider says so | "A leading Australian manufacturer" |
| 2. A production system on screen-share, driven by a non-employee | It survived real staff | A recorded demo |
| 3. The name and calendar of whoever builds it | You know who builds, and if they are free | "Our delivery team" |
| 4. A written answer to what you keep at the end | You are buying an asset, not attention | "We'll sort that out later" |
The portable rule underneath all four: ask for the thing, not the answer about the thing. Anything an AI vendor can only produce after you pay is a promise you cannot check.
Ask for a named client you can contact, not a logo wall
A named client you can contact is the first Azgard Show-Me List item. Across nine Sydney AI consulting firms whose case-study and client pages were checked on 20 August 2026, seven publish no client name at all. Two name clients: Team 400 lists Coast Smoke Alarms, and AI Consulting Group lists Momento Hospitality.
None of those nine Sydney firms publishes contact details for a referee. A name on a case-study page is not a reachable referee, and several named entries are products, not companies: Cargo Guardian, Springboards AI, Houdini AI Platform.
Some firms genuinely cannot publish names: Kernel Flow's terms reserve the right to use anonymised case studies. That is why the ask is a contact rather than a logo - confidentiality still lets a consultant ring a client and ask if they will take a call.
Watch someone who is not the consultant use the system in production
Item two of the Azgard Show-Me List is a screen-share of a system in production, driven by someone who does not work for the consultant. The idea is not new. Sydney firm Kernel Flow puts it as a rule: "the key is understanding if they build running systems or just write roadmap plans." Team 400, another Sydney consultancy, puts it as a count - how many AI systems does the firm have running in production right now - recorded in Azgard's competitor survey.
What the Show-Me List adds is the operator. A demo the consultant drives proves only that the consultant can drive it. Watch a client's staff member instead: where they hesitate, what they stopped using. An AI consultant needs no computer science degree, but whoever writes your build must have shipped something you can watch a stranger use.
Ask what you keep the day you stop paying
The fourth Azgard Show-Me List item is a written answer to what you keep the day you stop paying an AI consultant. Put it in the proposal: who holds the API keys and accounts, whose tenancy the automations run in, whether your documents sit in files you can open. A system you cannot administer is a subscription to their attention - the subject of you cannot buy your company brain.
Measurement nests inside this item: agree which number moves and who reads it, the job of the Azgard Three-Question Vendor Filter. Azgard publishes its exit answer, so a buyer can hold it to this: "every build is owned and documented so it runs without us."
How to verify an AI consultant's business is real in Australia
An Australian buyer can verify an AI consultant's business free, in ten minutes. Australian AI adoption went from 1% of businesses in 2022-23 to 12% in 2024-25, so the demand is new, and registration dates show whether the supplier is too.
| Register | What it shows free | Paid tier |
|---|---|---|
| ABN Lookup | Entity name and type, ABN and GST registration each with its effective date, state and postcode | Nothing to pay |
| ASIC Connect company register | Company type, ACN, registration and review dates, registered office suburb, documents lodged | $10 current extract; $20 with directors and history |
| ASIC business names register | Who holds a trading name, and their ABN | Extracts paid |
| buy.nsw supplier search | NSW Government ICT prequalification, small-business and NSW-based flags | Free, no login |
| AusTender | Federal contracts at or above $10,000 inc GST: agency, value, period, consultancy flag | Free, no login |
The GST date is a longevity signal almost nobody uses. GST registration is compulsory once turnover reaches $75,000, so its effective date on an ABN Lookup record roughly marks when the business became a trading concern. ABN Lookup carries no address, email or phone.
AusTender lists every Australian Government contract at or above $10,000 including GST for most agencies, showing whether an agency has paid this consultant. buy.nsw's SCM0020 ICT Services scheme carried 6,899 suppliers on 20 August 2026, 4,947 publicly listed, and its Advanced tier requires two referee reports for work in the last three years - somebody else already ran the reference check.
buy.nsw marks displayed supplier information unverified, so membership is the signal and the profile blurb carries no weight.
AI consultant red flags, and the ones that are not red flags
The AI consultant red flags worth acting on are refusals to produce something that exists. Refusing to name who does the work is the most common - one buyer called agencies "very secretive of who actually works there". That is the bait and switch: whoever sells is not whoever staffs it. A five-figure discovery phase as their smallest sellable unit is another, as is a proposal naming no deliverable you keep, or a certification presented as a qualification: no licence is required to call yourself an AI consultant here, and ASIC's professional registers cover financial services licensees, auditors and liquidators - consultants are not on them.
Two things look like red flags here and are not. A sole trader or a two-person Pty Ltd is fine in Australia; a hidden structure is what should worry you. Absence from buy.nsw or the AI Directory means nothing either: listing is voluntary, and NSW buyers can go direct to a small business up to $250,000 excluding GST.
Australian law helps less than buyers hope. Since 9 November 2023 the unfair contract terms protections cover a small business with fewer than 100 employees or under $10 million in annual turnover and no contract-value cap, replacing the old 20-employee and $300,000 tests. The maximum corporate penalty for conduct on or after 28 March 2026 is the greater of $100,000,000, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover
- the $50 million figure from 2022 is superseded. But only a court can void a term, and the ACCC does not investigate individual complaints. Start with the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, which mediates such disputes cheaply. None of it gets your project back - which is why the four demands come first.
How Azgard answers its own four questions
Azgard has to answer its own Show-Me List. It is one engineer in Sydney, Angus McDonald - on-site around Sydney, remote everywhere else.
Item one, a named client you can contact: three Australian ones - Apex Signage, Home Grown Electrical and Inner Game Basketball. Three, not thirty, and a buyer can ask for any by name. Item two, a system run by someone else: Apex Signage's quoting runs through a system Azgard built and Apex's own staff operate, with quoting time down from around three and a half hours to just over two per quote. Item three, who does the work: always Angus, a capacity ceiling rather than a feature - there is no bench to absorb a bad month. Item four, what you keep: every build documented in plain files your team can change without Azgard on retainer.
Two admissions that cost something. The Apex figure was never baselined the way Azgard's own AI Baseline Card demands - it misses two of the card's five fields - and is published anyway with that caveat. And two of Azgard's six offerings publish a price while four are scoped on a call, the opacity this page criticises; bands are in what an AI consultant costs in Australia. Run Azgard through the registers first.
FAQ
tags: vendor-evaluation ● hiring ● due-diligence ● procurement
Angus McDonald
Founder, Azgard
Builds and operates production AI systems for organisations that need results, not slide decks.