How should our firm use AI to win work without embarrassing ourselves?
Where AI helps consultancy business development, and where it must not
Give AI the research and the preparation. Keep the judgement and the send button. Set one rule before you buy anything: a person reads and sends anything that reaches a buyer. Start with research, not writing.
20 August 2026 · 4 min read
AI can do the finding and the preparing in business development. It must not do the sending. Here is exactly where the line goes, and the rule to set before you buy anything.
Set the rule first
Your reputation took years to build. A poorly judged message undoes it with one recipient in an afternoon, and you will never know it happened.
Split the work
Hand over what is slow, repetitive and checkable. Keep what is expensive to get subtly wrong.
| Give to AI | Why it is safe | Keep with a person |
|---|---|---|
| Scanning for triggers | It reports what changed in public information. Being wrong costs a wasted check. | Deciding whether a trigger is worth acting on. |
| Researching an account | Summarising what a company published has a right answer. | Deciding what the research means for this buyer. |
| Preparing a first draft | A draft is not a message. Nobody sees it but you. | Every word that goes out. |
| Maintaining the list | Re-checking forty companies for changes is tedious and mechanical. | Scoring fit and deciding who to drop. |
Build it in this order
- 1AI checks your named list for your defined triggers, once a week, and reports what changed.
- 2For anything that fired, it does the fifteen minutes of research in the same shape every time.
- 3It drafts an approach following your written play, including the specific thing that happened there.
- 4A partner reads the draft, changes what needs changing, and sends it themselves.
- 5Nothing else is automated. No sequences, no bulk sending, no follow-ups that fire without a person looking.
Most of the hours in business development go into finding and preparing, not writing. That is exactly the part it is safe to hand over.
Do not do these two things
- Do not buy a tool before you have defined a market and written a play. It will faithfully scale whatever you point it at, including nothing.
- Do not automate follow-ups. A follow-up firing without a person reading the reply thread is the fastest way to look like you are not paying attention.
The test that tells you it is working
Are you getting more first conversations than before? If your tool spend is rising month over month and your conversations are not, you are automating something that should not be done at all.
Choosing not to do something beats automating it. Volume was never the constraint.
What to do next
- 1Write the approval rule down and tell the firm.One sentence: nothing reaches a buyer without a named person reading it and sending it. Do this before you buy anything.
- 2List what you do by hand and mark each checkable or judgement.Checkable means somebody could verify the answer. Hand those over first.
- 3Start with research, not writing.Give AI the fifteen minutes of account research before a single word of a message.
- 4Turn off any automated follow-up you have running. Today.Replace it with the approvals slot in your weekly hour.
- 5Check conversations against tool spend every month.Spend up and conversations flat means stop, not optimise.
Read next
The Business Development Workshop builds this into your firm in a day: your market mapped and ranked beforehand, the plays written and installed in the tools you already use, and thirty days of support while your team runs it.
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