Running at AI speed without losing control

If you are leading a consulting firm, the smartest way to embrace AI is not to build everything internally, nor to scatter client data across dozens of disconnected tools.
The right move is to adopt a platform that delivers speed, flexibility, and trust without the chaos.

A familiar story

Consider two common paths.

A consulting CEO hires one of those rare, almost impossible-to-find AI developers. It feels like a breakthrough.
But soon it becomes clear that one person cannot cover it all: front end, back end, retrieval, knowledge graphs, optimization, governance. Costs rise, focus drifts, and the consultants are still waiting for something usable with clients.

Meanwhile, another firm takes the opposite approach. They sign up for Microsoft Copilot, experiment with Copilot Studio, and add a few other AI agents from shiny startups. Six months later they are juggling more than 15 tools, license costs are spiraling, and sensitive data is scattered across vendors.
Consultants are still manually copying results from one system to another.

Both firms wanted transformation. Both ended up with distraction.

These examples are not isolated. They reveal the most common traps consulting leaders fall into when working with AI.

The traps to avoid

There are three common mistakes consulting leaders make when dealing with AI:

• Building everything yourself
  Creating your own AI solutions, or even training your own large language model, sounds tempting. But it is dangerous and extremely expensive. Most firms cannot sustain the ongoing investment.

• Trusting black box agents
  Using AI agents in closed platforms may look impressive, but if the outcomes cannot be explained or traced, then your clients can’t trust them either.

• Stacking off-the-shelf tools
  Picking one AI tool per activity feels efficient at first. But with thousands of new solutions launched into the market every month, it quickly leads to tool sprawl, rising license costs, and scattered data. Worst of all, the process remains manual and disconnected.

How Altea tackles this

Altea is an AI-driven consultancy platform, designed specifically for small and midsize consulting firms.
It combines the speed of off-the-shelf components with the control of custom development — without forcing firms into either extreme.

Altea approaches every capability decision with one question:
Should this be built, bought, or integrated?

The process is simple but disciplined:

• Define the consultant’s requirement and the client outcome
• Apply guiding principles such as transparency, completeness, and sovereignty
• Review what the market already provides as proven and reliable
• Decide with intent — integrating what speeds up work and building only what ensures trust

Inside the architecture of Altea

Altea embraces proven components where they are commodities:

• Foundation models via Replicate, with the option to self-host if sovereignty requires
• Neo4j for knowledge graphs
• Established libraries for files and data, including pandas, pdfminer, PyPDF2, python-docx, python-pptx, openpyxl

Altea focuses on the foundations that matter most to consultants:

• The orchestration layer that makes everything work together
• The explainability logic that ensures outcomes can be trusted and traced
• The trust framework that enforces sovereignty, authority, and stability

The payoff for consulting leaders

With Altea, consulting firms get the best of both worlds:

• Speed without chaos — the latest features, integrated and usable, without tool sprawl
• Control with flexibility — the ability to decide which models to use and where data is hosted
• Trust at the core — outcomes that are explainable, stable, and future-proof

Final word

The smartest move is not trying to out-code the tech giants or gamble on whichever AI tool pops up next.
It is making deliberate choices on where to buy or integrate speed, and where to build for control.

That is exactly what Altea enables: consulting firms can run at AI speed without losing control of their business, their data, or their clients’ trust.