How to choose an AI consultant in the UK: the show-me list
How to choose an AI consultant in the UK: ask for a client you can phone, a system in production, a named builder, and what you keep at the end.
Angus McDonald · 20 Aug 2026 · 8 min read
written for United Kingdom ● also for Australia, United States, Canada, New Zealand
The Azgard Show-Me List is four things to ask a UK 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 with none is billing you to learn.
Why most AI consultant vetting checklists test the wrong thing
Most AI consultant vetting checklists test what the consultant says: the methodology, the certifications. A market that selects on answers selects for whoever answers most fluently, which is a different skill from building something that still runs in March.
The questions that work are the ones whose answers existed before you asked. Nothing a consultant does between your enquiry and your meeting conjures a client who will take your call. Ask for the thing, not the answer about the thing.
The Azgard Show-Me List: how to choose an AI consultant by what they produce
The Azgard Show-Me List is four artefacts you ask an AI consultant to produce, in this order, before money changes hands. Each is either handed over or it is not.
| # | Ask them to produce | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A named client you can contact | A business, a person, and permission to ring them this week |
| 2 | A system in production, run by a non-employee | A screen share where a client's own staff drives |
| 3 | The name and calendar of whoever does your work | Their name, availability, and presence on calls after the invoice clears |
| 4 | A written answer to what you keep if you stop paying | Documents, accounts and credentials under your control |
Measurement belongs to item 4: once you know what you keep, run the Azgard Three-Question Vendor Filter over how the result gets counted.
Ask for a named client you can contact, not a logo wall
A named client you can contact is the first thing to ask an AI consultant for, and in the UK the bar has already moved past the logo wall. Of nine UK AI consultancy websites Azgard checked on 20 August 2026 - four of them London firms - eight name at least one identifiable client organisation and one names none. Naming is the norm here, so logos prove little: one of those eight lists six real organisations by name with no case study and no reachable referee behind any of them.
So the ask goes further: a client you can telephone this week. That is the standard the UK's own trade body sets for itself, and the Management Consultancies Association admits firms only on two client case studies with referees it contacts. Borrow the MCA's standard; almost no consultancy pitching an SME will be a member of it.
One of the nine names clients only with their written permission, which is fair: some consultancies genuinely cannot publish names, and that is why the ask is a contact rather than a public logo. On the call, ask what broke and who runs it now.
Watch someone who is not the consultant use the system in production
A system in production, operated by someone who does not work for the consultant, is the second item on the Show-Me List and the one most firms quietly fail. Ask for a screen share and watch a client's own staff use it on an ordinary Tuesday. A consultant driving the demo shows you a rehearsal.
Two Sydney AI consultancies published this test before Azgard did. Kernel Flow's rule is to work out whether a consultant builds running systems or just writes roadmap plans, and Team 400's question is how many AI systems you have running in production right now. The Show-Me List adds one turn: not how many, but let me watch one, driven by somebody whose salary you do not pay.
Ask what you keep the day you stop paying
What you keep the day you stop paying is the fourth item on the Show-Me List, and the one proposals most often omit. Ask in writing which documents, accounts and credentials you keep, and whether the system runs once the consultant's own subscription lapses. A good answer names files in storage you already own; a bad answer is a login on their side. That matters more with AI than most consulting, because the valuable part is the written record of how your business works rather than the model, and you cannot buy your company brain.
How to verify an AI consultant's business is real in the UK
Verifying that a UK AI consultancy is a real, trading business costs nothing, needs no account, and takes under an hour. Six public registers do most of it.
| Check | Where | What it discloses |
|---|---|---|
| Companies House | find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk | Status, registered office, SIC code, filing history with free document images, current and resigned officers, disqualified directors, previous and dissolved names, insolvency - free, no account |
| ICO register of fee payers | ico.org.uk | Whether they process personal data at all, their address, other trading names, and the fee tier they pay |
| Check a UK VAT number | gov.uk | Whether a VAT number is valid, and the business it belongs to |
| Cyber Essentials search | iasme.co.uk | Certificate level and expiry - only the last 12 months appear, so a lapsed one vanishes |
| G-Cloud service listing | applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk | The description they wrote for government, and the price they quote the public sector |
| Contracts Finder | gov.uk | Public sector contracts over £12,000 including VAT, no account |
Two techniques beat the rest. Search the director, not the company: officer search returns every appointment that person holds or has resigned from, which shows whether this consultancy is the third company at that address in five years. And read the ICO fee tier as a size band - £52 micro, £78 small and medium, £3,763 large - since a consultancy pitching enterprise-scale AI work on the £52 micro tier has published its own size.
Two dates matter. Identity verification at Companies House is compulsory and the transition closes on 18 November 2026, though no verified badge appears on the public officer pages yet. And a private buyer cannot browse the G-Cloud catalogue, but anyone can read a supplier's listing free, including the price they quote government. As at August 2026 the live framework is G-Cloud 14, expiring 28 October 2026, with G-Cloud 15 awarded on 6 August 2026 by the Government Commercial Agency, formerly Crown Commercial Service.
The honest half: none of it tells you turnover, profit or headcount. For accounting periods beginning on or after 6 April 2025 a micro-entity is a company meeting two of: turnover no more than £1 million, balance sheet total no more than £500,000, no more than 10 employees on average. It is exempt from filing a profit and loss account, so a firm turning over £900,000 and one turning over £40,000 file identical-looking documents. The nature-of-business line is a code the company chose from a list with no entry for artificial intelligence, and the company itself cost £100 and about a day, one of 815,277 incorporations in the year to March 2026. The register is generous about who someone is and silent about whether they can do the work.
AI consultant red flags, and the ones that are not red flags
Real AI consultant red flags are behaviours, not credentials: a refusal to name the person who will do the work, a proposal whose first deliverable is another proposal, a demo nobody outside the firm has used, a percentage improvement promised before anyone has seen your data, and pricing that surfaces only after a discovery call, when what an AI consultant costs in the UK is already published.
Two things look like red flags and are not: a small firm, though a small firm that will not name its builder is one, and a missing machine-learning degree, because most of this work is process design and integration.
In the UK, entry is cheap and the recourse afterwards is thin. No licence for AI or management consultancy appears in the government's own licence finder, so anyone can trade as an AI consultant tomorrow having paid £100 for a company. Consumer protection law protects consumers, not a limited company buying consultancy, and enforcement of the business-to-business rules is a Trading Standards duty to prosecute the advertiser rather than refund you. Your remedy is a county court claim, at £455 to issue between £5,000.01 and £10,000. Free to verify before you pay; £455 to begin arguing after.
How Azgard answers its own four questions
Azgard's answers to its own Show-Me List are checkable and, in places, unflattering. The name of the person who does your work always resolves to one name: Azgard is one engineer, Angus, so whoever scopes your work builds it and is also the capacity ceiling. A named client you can contact and a system in production you can watch are answerable for three clients, not thirty: Apex Signage, Home Grown Electrical and Inner Game Basketball, all Australian. At Apex, quoting time fell from around three and a half hours to just over two per quote, and that figure fails two fields of Azgard's own Baseline Card.
Run the six checks above against Azgard and most return nothing: no Companies House record, no ICO fee-payer entry, no Cyber Essentials certificate, no G-Cloud listing. Azgard is Sydney-based and delivers remotely, with no UK entity, office or staff. The UK page says the same: if you need a UK-registered supplier who can visit, hire in the UK.
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.