Artificial Intelligence (AI) Consulting Services Resources

Why to Ask: Discovery is the foundational work that happens before anyone writes a single line of code. This is the phase where the team defines what the software needs to accomplish for your business and makes all of the decisions that set the path forward. Inexperienced agencies, although they mean well, often mishandle this phase. A junior developer may listen to your idea, but may lack enough experience to see the many technical details required to get it right. Seasoned agencies, on the other hand, have completed enough builds to know intuitively what must be considered in discovery to protect you from expensive surprises once the build starts. Another part of this detailed prework is cleaning the underlying data so the system can be trusted. If a chatbot is running on messy data, it may confidently produce wrong or dangerous answers. That risk becomes especially serious in legal, medical, or financial settings. Rush this step and you will end up with a fragile prototype that breaks once real people start using it. If an inexperienced vendor does not plan a strong underlying architecture for you, each new feature you try to add to the codebase later becomes harder to ship than the last one.

Why to Ask: There is nothing wrong with using AI code generators. Here at Valere, our developers use these tools 70% of the time, and our coding efficiency is up 60% as a result. In fact, AI coding tools are so capable that very few developers are writing all their own code anymore. The problem is that low-cost developers rely entirely on these tools as a shortcut to skip the architecture you need. Without that backbone, your maintenance costs on the product they build for you will skyrocket. Not to mention, every new feature you try to add in the future becomes nearly impossible. Eventually you will be forced to rebuild it from scratch (at three to five times the cost of building it properly the first time). Industry data shows that 61% of AI-generated code requires significant refactoring before it is ready for real users. Think of it like a rough draft email ChatGPT wrote for you. It serves as a starting point, but still needs finessing. Working code is not the same as production ready code. Therefore, a low-cost developer who vibe-codes your solution will set you up for disaster if they lack the skillset to properly customize and refactor the code. Even if the product technically runs, it is likely full of messy logic, security vulnerabilities, and structural issues that make it unreliable long term. Instead, the agency you need to hire must have senior engineers who can tear the raw code down, spot what might fail in real-world conditions, and rewrite those lines by hand. Accenture research shows that without senior oversight, technical debt compounds at a rate of 23% per month. That is why at Valere, our veteran engineers review every line of code to catch errors and clean up the rough edges. It is a time-consuming process requiring someone with years of hands-on practice because AI cannot handle its own QA.

I use AI to get past writer's block or to help generate ideas.