Artificial intelligence, and especially machine learning, has been one of the most influential technologies of the last two decades, and almost every company that has been looking to expand and grow has more or less needed to use machine learning to some extent.
Sadly, however, machine learning is far from easy and straightforward, and without the required expertise, you’ll easily make avoidable mistakes that could ruin your entire effort to use machine learning.
This is why you need to make sure you have the expertise and the skill required behind you before you embark on adopting machine learning in your business.
One of the best ways you can do that is by hiring a consulting agency to help you during the research and implementation processes.
Sadly, many business managers also don’t know how to hire the right consulting company. This is why we wrote this article — here, you’ll find a list of the most common and helpful tips that will guarantee you select the right consulting agency for the job.
1. Check Their Portfolio
The first thing you can do when you’re trying to hire a consulting company is checking their portfolio. Unlike traditional companies where they have physical products you can check and test, you hire a consulting agency based on intangible, hard-to-measure things like return on investment, growth, etc. and the best way you can check on these is by checking their portfolio.
You should start by checking out the projects most relevant to your business and you, and then you should look at their achievements to see if they are up to your standards. If it is, then you are already starting on the right foot with the consulting agency.
2. Check Their Team
After checking the portfolio to learn whether the agency has enough relevant experience to handle the machine learning project for your company, next up comes the decision to make that the team composition of the agency is diverse and includes team members with different specialties.
Machine learning isn’t straightforward and a team of software engineers isn’t all that you need to successfully implement it. Ideally, you will have a team of software engineers, statisticians, and business analysts.
Business analysts are needed to ask the right questions and find the best things to measure, statisticians are needed to create the math models that accurately measure the variables, and software engineers are needed to automate the whole process and create the machine learning model.
3. Check Their Support Packages
Machine learning algorithms don’t degrade physically, but they need constant support and tuning to make it work effectively, and that’s why continuous support from the consulting agency is so important. It is one of the major things that will determine your success.
This is why it is important to check the support packages of the agencies to ensure they provide enough support for your business going forward. It is one of the only ways you’ll be able to implement and manage a complex machine learning algorithm that helps you clean and analyze data.
4. Check Their Prices
Lastly, something that should factor in, in every company’s decision is the price of the service. The usual caveats apply here: make sure the price of the service is affordable, compare it to other, similar services to determine whether it is a good deal or not, and finally, make sure you’re not compromising quality by choosing really low-priced agencies — try to choose the best machine learning consulting agencies.
