Anyone here going down the Claude Partner road?

But it also has an expiration date. Right now, sticking "AI" in front of "consultant" is a real edge. The search demand is there. The budgets are there. Companies are actively hunting for someone who can walk in, look at their operations, and tell them what to actually do with this stuff. So if you're trying to position yourself, take the label. It works. But the label is the temporary part and we've seen this cycle before. → When Excel showed up, people might've called themselves "Excel accountants." But how ridiculous would it be if someone introduced themselves like that today? → When the internet showed up, people spun up "internet marketing" agencies. Now that's just marketing. AI is doing the same thing to consulting because AI is going to seep into everything. In a few years, the qualifier drops. The consultants who aren't AI native won't be winning business. They'll just be bad consultants. The job under the hood doesn't change. A consultant walks into a business, finds the actual constraint, and prescribes a solution. The newest tech is the toolbox, not the job description. But people take the "AI consultant" title and assume the answer always has to be AI. Sometimes the right call is a database restructure. Sometimes it's a better SaaS tool. Sometimes it's a deterministic workflow with zero AI in it. I'm not saying AI is never the answer. It's the highest-impact tool we've had in a long time. But forcing it where it doesn't belong is how clients lose trust fast. I think about it as a pyramid. → Bottom: deterministic workflows. No AI. Cheap, fast, reliable. → Middle: AI workflows. More power, more cost, more failure modes. → Top: AI agents. Maximum capability, maximum risk, longest time to ship. The higher you climb, the more it costs, the longer it takes, and the more ways it breaks. More risk. Start at the bottom. Only move up when the problem actually demands it. The label "AI consultant" gets you in the door right now. The discipline of solving the real problem with the simplest possible solution is what keeps you there once everyone else catches up.

Let's get to know each other! Comment below sharing where you are in the world, a career goal you have, and something you like to do for fun. 😊

Hi all! 👋 I'm Todd, from Tampa I'm an old-timey IT guy and an entrepreneur of 30+ years. I started a dial-up ISP in the mid-90's with Linux and grew it to a post-dot-com-bubble cloud support company (pre GCP), but left IT in 2010. My experience for the last 20ish years has been in business development, spanning real estate, executive coaching, photography, and local government. I left public service in 2023 after the death of the commissioner I was supporting, and was promptly bitten by the ChatGPT bug. I'll be honest that I've been snookered by a couple of other "gurus" and their online communities, and I'm looking for a new online home that aligns with my goals. The financial cost aside, I'm working through the feelings that I wasted much of my time chasing what I was never going to be. What I have been doing is consulting for an SMB doing Claude Teams training and Skill building... I believe the new term is FDE, or Forward Deployed Engineer. I'm working through the Anthropic Academy and hope to be certified and become an Anthropic Partner - if/when they open it back up. Some of my time is building a 3-node Kubernetes cluster and a bare-metal, dual-GPU AI inference server on Linux and vLLM. (pic to catch your attention 😀) This started from my son's summer project - and briefly made me want to switch to DevOps, but now it's the platform for me to build my 2nd brain. I also (try to) balance all this with my love of hockey, being a USA Hockey youth coach for both a 16U travel team and our local JV and Varsity High School hockey teams. Besides being brilliant, my son is a pretty dang good hockey player. 🏒 🥅 So that's me in a nutshell. I'm happy to connect with like-minded people. (disclaimer: all hyphens, em-dashes, and oxford commas are mine. 😂) #AISChallenge

Wanted to introduce myself a little more intentionally. I’m Ryan. I’ve been in marketing/operations for about 9 years, and AI has completely changed the way I think about workflows, systems, and automation these last couple years. I’m especially interested in helping nonprofits and human-centered businesses scale their impact through better organization, follow-up, outreach, and operational systems. A lot of what I care about comes down to: * reducing overwhelm * organizing chaos * building better systems * helping good people operate more effectively Also building almost entirely from my iPad right now which has been a fun challenge in itself. Would love to connect with more people thinking about AI in an ethical and people-centered way.