I understand the appeal of handing the whole thing to someone else. Truly. When your team is already at capacity, a proposal that says "we will handle this for you" can sound like oxygen.
But I want to be more precise about what should be outsourced now, because AI is changing the old rule. We are learning that AI is quite good at what we used to call thinking. OpenAI's GDPVal work tested models on real-world knowledge tasks built by professionals with an average of over 14 years of experience. Frontier models are already approaching expert quality on some of those tasks, and OpenAI reported they can complete GDPVal tasks roughly 100 times faster and 100 times cheaper than industry experts before human oversight and integration are counted.
So yes, in many cases, let AI do the first round of thinking. Let it compare, plan, draft, reason through options, and find patterns. Unless you or the consultant can beat the quality, speed, and price, it is strange to pretend the expensive human should always go first.
The short version
AI is becoming very strong at planning down: turning goals, context, and constraints into a useful plan. Humans and agents still have to help with doing up: checking reality, gathering the right material, executing the steps, and improving the work as it meets the real world.
The specialist may still matter
Sometimes you need outside help. I am not precious about this. Bring in the specialist. Buy the software. Pay for the build when the work truly calls for it.
Just do not confuse outside help with outside context. A vendor can ship a workflow your team cannot explain. AI can draft a plan that sounds confident and misses the local truth. Both can look beautifully finished on day one. Then a data source changes, your board asks for a different view, the grant rules move, or the director wants the output written in a different voice.
Now you have a ticket.
Your company brain is the asset
The better use of your time is assembling the company brain. Your source canon. Your trusted data. Your past proposals. Your board preferences. Your examples of good work. Your rules for what can be said publicly and what needs a human before it leaves the building.
No outside tool knows that out of the box. Your people know it because they do the work. They know the county commissioners, the plant manager, the small business owner, the site selector, the mayor who wants the one-page version and the board member who will read every footnote.
That knowledge is not a nice extra. It is the system.
Stay close to the doing
The goal is not to turn every EDO into a software company. Please, no. Most teams do not need to code. They do need to understand the work well enough to feed AI the right context, test the plan, revise the output, and know what needs to happen next.
That is the ownership line. Let AI plan down. Let humans and agents do up. Name the inputs, gather the context, check the output, adjust the process, and teach the next person how it works.
Hire help when it makes sense. Use AI aggressively where it is better and cheaper. But keep the company brain close. That is where your judgment lives, and judgment is the thing AI needs in order to be useful.