My Experience in ML Expert Consulting

How it is done now and how SylphAI does it differently and better?

Introduction

This blog post is about my experience in expert consulting in machine learning (ML) and data science (DS), as my side-gigs. I have been working full-time as a ML engineer and data scientist. In the past 2 years I’ve done 20+ of these consulting calls, mainly for market research companies as well as investment firms who are interested in the ML space.

What’s expert consulting?

Expert consulting is a professional service where an individual with specialized knowledge and experience provides advice and guidance to clients in a specific field or industry. To be successful in expert consulting, you must have in-depth knowledge and experience in the field (in my case, ML), as well as the ability to communicate effectively with clients.

Topics and rate

The type of expert consulting I did was mostly a one-time project (1–2 hours) via video conferencing and most of my clients are either from the market research companies or the investment firms. The hourly rate is much higher than my ML freelance work (see my other post here), where I’ve charged around $200–500 per hour.

As for the topics of these consultation projects, two categories are most common in my case. First, the market research, where the research firm was hired by AWS or GCP for example (or a ML tooling startup), that they are going to show a new product that has not been released, and have you try it out and give them feedback, in these projects, you have to sign NDA (nondisclosure agreement) before accepting the project. They were really fun and it’s cool to see when they actually used my feedback in their final product feature.

Second, the market trend, where the investment firms are looking into investing in a certain field in the industry and they’d like to seek experts’ opinions and do due diligence before pouring in their investment money. As of late 2022 to earlier 2023, I spoke to a few investment firms on the market trend in the generative AI space. I also found these conversations to be very interesting and rewarding, as I can share my understanding and opinions, at the same time, gain valuable insights from the perspectives of the investment firms.

How did I get started?

I got started with expert consulting via LinkedIn invitations from third party sourcing agencies, such as Zintro and AlphaSight, as well as B2B market research companies, such as NewtonX and URI (User Research International). As the first step, you will need to be invited (at least most of them) to create your professional profile on each of these sites, therefore, a good and detailed LinkedIn profile is essential to get this type of invitation. There are more and more sourcing and market research companies wanting you to sign up and become the expert consultant on their sites, such as Expertwired.

Process

After you have a profile within their systems (sourcing agencies and market research firms), when they have a consultation project relevant to your background and experiences, they will reach out. From there, either an associate from the market/ sourcing agencies will get on a quick phone call with you and ask you some screening questions that their clients require, or fill out a questionnaire so their clients can filter and identify the candidate they really want to talk with. Then, usually after a day or two, if you are selected for the project, the same associate will reach out and schedule a time with you to do the consultation call.

Ineffectiveness

The above process seems reasonable, however, I found it highly ineffective in most cases. For example, once I was in their systems, I have been getting emails and LinkedIn messages all the time about some relevant projects that often turned out to be completely irrelevant to my ML experiences. In addition, each call with the associates normally takes like 10 mins, which the qualification questions they ask can easily be seen in my LinkedIn profile. As for the questionnaire, it’s rather lengthy and can take up to 20–30 minutes of my time. After doing all the calls and questionnaires, I found that on average I have only been getting around 2–3 consultation projects out of 10 potential contacts.

I have been thinking about the reasons for this ineffectiveness. Large parts are due to ML being fairly new and a fast-changing field, the associates likely don’t have the expertise to tell if you really have the ML experiences that their clients require. It seems like there’re not many third party sourcing agencies specialized in AI/ ML either.

SylphAI

I’ve recently affiliated with SylphAI and we are building the infrastructure (a flexible work platform) to reduce the frictions I mentioned above. The clients (i.e. market research and investment firms) can directly book the time with AI/ ML experts (at this point nearly 900 engineer profiles) on the platform by filtering the qualifications, without going through the third party sourcing agencies, which I believe would be more efficient for both consultants and clients.

Conclusion

Utilizing my time for ML expert consulting has been fun and rewarding, not only have they generated some extra cash for me, but they also have provided me with the opportunity to speak for my opinions and insights, at the same time, learn from different perspectives, in product design as well as investment.

P.S. If you have potential consultation project, you can directly book a time with me via SylphAI ConsultSpace.

Note: this post was originally published on SylphAI’s blog site.