Senior AI consulting & strategy talent and rates in Fitness & Wellness
Senior AI consulting & strategy engineers serving fitness & wellness run roughly $180–$280/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Mindbody + Stripe + HealthKit + Vimeo OTT — common integrations: Mindbody + ClubReady + Glofox, Stripe + Square subscriptions, Apple HealthKit + Google Fit. Personalized programming; injury-risk models; nutrition coaching
What AI consulting & strategy actually requires in 2026
Consulting outputs are deliverables, not code: AI maturity assessments, use-case prioritization matrices, build-vs-buy analyses, vendor selections (OpenAI vs Anthropic vs self-hosted), roadmaps with cost models. 2026 consultants ship using Notion, Miro, Excel, and Loom — not Figma or Jira. Senior AI consultants combine technical depth (can debug an embedding mismatch) with executive communication (can present to a board). Pure-academic ML PhDs without business framing fail; pure-business consultants without technical depth produce slop deliverables.