AI Consulting Fireside Chat

Hosted by Jason Liu, Vignesh Mohankumar, and Skylar Payne

Thu, Jul 10, 2025

5:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

149 students

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Go deeper with a course

Indie AI Consulting: Positioning, Pricing, and Proposals
Jason Liu
View syllabus

What you'll learn

Getting Started in AI Consulting

Learn practical first steps and common entry paths into the AI consulting field from industry practitioners.

Client Engagement Best Practices

Discover proven strategies for managing AI projects and building strong client relationships in consulting work.

Navigating AI Industry Challenges

Understand how to overcome typical obstacles and adapt to the rapidly changing AI consulting landscape.

Why this topic matters

Join Jason, Vignesh, and Skylar for an informal conversation about their journeys in AI consulting. The three consultants will share insights from their experiences, discuss how they got started in the field, and explore the evolving landscape of AI implementation in business. A relaxed discussion covering the practical realities of building an AI consulting practice and lessons learned.

You'll learn from

Jason Liu

Consultant at the intersection of Information Retrieval and AI

Jason has built search and recommendation systems for the past 6 years. He has consulted and advised a dozens startups in the last year to improve their RAG systems. He is the creator of the Instructor Python library.

Vignesh Mohankumar

Applied AI Consultant at Nila

Vignesh is an independent consultant working on Applied AI. He works with companies to get AI shipped to production within 30 days. He also helps upskill engineering teams on AI usage. Previously he was one of the first engineers at Drift (acquired $1.2b). Read testimonials at https://nila.is.  

Skylar Payne

Founder of Wicked Data LLC

Skylar Payne specializes in rescuing AI systems that work in demos but fail in production. As founder of Wicked Data LLC, he diagnoses and fixes broken retrieval systems for startups and enterprises alike. Previously, as VP of Engineering & Data Science at HealthRhythms, he built monitoring systems that caught silent ML failures before they reached users. At LinkedIn, he led teams that increased experimentation velocity 3x while moving core metrics by double digits through improved recommendation systems. At Google, he developed testing infrastructure for large-scale distributed systems. Skylar has personally debugged retrieval systems across every scale—from early prototypes to platforms serving hundreds of millions—and brings battle-tested patterns that bridge the gap between ML experiments and reliable products.

worked with

Stitch Fix
Meta
University of Waterloo
New York University

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