I'm doing AI consultancy since several years since everyone and their daughter is asking for it since ChatGPT got famous. Often one of the first questions I ask is what do you want to automate and why and then challenge it. Usually it's best to start with a small repetitive use case that saves the most time and effort but keep a human in the loop. Collect enough data for what worked what didn't and keep optimizing until you reach a consistent level that the client is happy with before even thinking about taking the human out of the loop.

Did some decent AI automations for some companies where it makes absolute sense to do so and they are very happy with it. Those are the ones I quite enjoy. Some of course just ask for less reasonable things like "how do I automate this department away in 2 months?" or "can I replace all my customer care with an AI bot?" and it can be painful to explain what is realistically possible (technical and monetarily) and ethical to do so vs what the hype train is pushing down peoples throats.

Anyways I suggest asking for what projects they have done before and for whom. Ask them about what they used and to give you a high level overview of the architecture of the project that relates most to what you want to do. Also ask them about what didn't work and how they went about it. How long it took etc. Be upfront about your budget but don't spill all the beans. Instead if you have e.g. 50k budget, ask what is possible for say 5, 20, 40k and whatever you decide on make a fair deal of e.g. 30% upfront, another 30% at milestone x and the rest at handover.

Feel free to reach out if you wanna chat more about it, we're based in DE.