Core question
Should I hire a developer or a consultant to lead our AI work?
Short answer
Both, in the right order. Developers build. Advisors make sure the build solves the right problem. Hiring a developer to set your AI strategy is like hiring a plumber to design your house. The pipes will be excellent. The roof is a different discipline.
Most of the AI builds we get called in to fix had solid code and broken thinking. No discovery, no impact analysis, no business case. The developers were not wrong. They were the wrong role for that part of the work.
You cannot code your way out of a business problem nobody understands yet. Proper discovery means understanding the ripple effect of automation on people, processes, and customers, and being in the room where strategy happens rather than being handed a specification afterward to execute.
Developers deliver what you ask for. An advisor challenges why you are asking. Both are necessary. The order is what determines whether you get value.
What discovery has to produce is a description of the business requirement specific enough for a builder to work from. Which part of the process. What currently consumes the most time. What information is confidential. Who approves the output. What would count as improvement. Hand a developer the instruction to use AI to improve proposals and they have to fill in every one of those gaps themselves, usually by guessing. Discovery also has to involve the people doing the work, because they know the exceptions and workarounds that never made it into anyone's process document.
There is a second reason the sequence matters, which has to do with how the build itself is staged. Proving a concept cheaply and building something that can carry real production load are two different jobs requiring two different skill sets, and they need to happen in that order and on purpose.