AI Automation for Consulting & Agencies
Take onboarding, reporting, and proposals off your billable team without hiring an ops manager.
For consultancies and agencies, AI automation means client onboarding that runs itself, reports that assemble from live data, and proposals generated from a scoping form. SBD builds these so senior people stop spending billable hours on admin — typically recovering several hours per consultant per week.
What usually breaks
Onboarding is a checklist someone runs by hand
Contracts, folders, access, kickoff scheduling and intake forms are all manual, so every new client costs hours before any work starts.
Reporting eats the end of every month
Consultants pull numbers from several tools and paste them into decks. The work is not analysis, it is copying — and it is billed to nobody.
Proposals get rewritten from scratch
Scope, pricing and SOW language live in old documents, so each proposal is a search-and-replace exercise with real risk of stale terms.
Institutional knowledge is unsearchable
Past work sits across drives and threads. New team members re-ask questions the firm has already answered a dozen times.
The systems we ship
Client onboarding workflows
One trigger sets up the folder structure, sends the contract, provisions access, schedules kickoff, and files the intake responses where delivery can use them.
Automated client reporting
Reports that assemble themselves from the tools already holding the data, on a schedule, in your format — leaving consultants to write the commentary.
Proposal and SOW builders
A structured scoping input produces a consistent, current proposal with the right pricing and terms, rather than a copy of the last one.
AI search over your own knowledge
A retrieval agent across past decks, notes and documentation, so the firm answers from what it already knows.
Typical Stack
- Airtable
- Notion
- Make.com
- n8n
- Retool
- Softr
- OpenAI / Claude
- Google Workspace APIs
Consulting & Agencies, answered
Is this worth it for a small team?
Often more so. A ten-person consultancy has no ops hire to absorb admin, so it lands on billable people. Automating onboarding and reporting for a small team usually pays back faster than it does at scale, because the recovered hours are directly billable.
Will AI-generated reports be accurate?
The numbers are not generated — they are pulled directly from the source systems, so they are as accurate as your data. We use AI for the parts where it is genuinely reliable, such as summarising and formatting, and leave calculation to the systems that already own it.
What about client confidentiality?
We scope data handling with you before building, and can keep client data inside your existing tools rather than moving it to new ones. Where AI is involved, we can route through providers with no-training guarantees or keep processing self-hosted.
Related solutions
Most operations problems cross more than one boundary. These are the areas that usually come up alongside consulting & agencies.
Not sure where the bottleneck is?
That is what the free workflow audit is for. We map how your operations actually run and tell you what is worth automating — before anyone talks about scope or price.
Claim a Free Workflow Audit