AI Advisory · Service 04

Cut through the AI hype. Build a strategy that actually compounds.

Most businesses know they should be doing something with AI. Few know exactly what, or in what order. We help leadership teams make the right bets — and avoid the expensive ones — with a fractional AI strategist on your side.

Engagements from $2,500 · Retainers from $3,500/mo · Remote-first, async-friendly

Book a consultation → See what's included

The real problem

The gap between AI hype and AI value.

What we hear from leadership teams

— "We've tried three AI tools and none of them stuck."
— "Our board wants an AI strategy but we don't know where to start."
— "We're paying for ChatGPT Enterprise but no one uses it consistently."
— "We're worried about being disrupted but not sure where the real risk is."
— "We have a lot of data but it's not clean enough to do anything with."
— "We hired a big consulting firm and got a slide deck we can't execute."

What a good AI advisory engagement delivers

→ A clear map of where AI creates value in your specific business model — not a generic framework.
→ An honest build-vs.-buy analysis with total cost of ownership, not just sticker price.
→ A data readiness audit: what you have, what shape it's in, and what you need to collect to make AI work cheap.
→ A prioritized roadmap your team can actually execute — starting next quarter, not "in 18 months."
→ A single senior advisor who has shipped real AI products — not a generalist who learned AI last year.

Engagements

Three ways to work with us on AI strategy.

One-time

AI Readiness Assessment

A structured, one-time engagement to assess where your business stands today and what an AI strategy would actually look like in practice. We interview your team, audit your data infrastructure, review your current tool stack, and deliver a written report with a prioritized action plan.

Includes 2 stakeholder workshops, data infrastructure audit, tool stack review, competitive landscape scan, written strategy report, 90-day action plan, and a 1-hour review call.

From $2,500 Book a call →

Monthly retainer · Most popular

Fractional AI Strategist

An ongoing monthly engagement where we serve as your embedded AI advisor — attending leadership meetings, reviewing vendor proposals, guiding implementation decisions, and keeping your AI roadmap current as the technology evolves. The equivalent of a senior AI engineering lead, without the full-time hire.

Includes 2 advisory calls/month, async Slack access, roadmap reviews, vendor evaluation support, implementation oversight, and a monthly written strategy update.

From $3,500/mo Book a call →

Project-based

Data Infrastructure Design

For teams that know they want to use AI but whose data isn't ready. We design and sometimes build the data pipelines, warehousing architecture, and feature stores that make future AI work cheap instead of painful. Includes evaluation of whether you need a data warehouse at all.

Includes Data audit, architecture design doc, tooling recommendations (dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, or simpler), pipeline build (optional), and documentation for your engineering team.

$5,000 – $20,000 Book a call →

Why trust us on AI

We've built AI products, not just slide decks.

Enterprise experience

Built at scale

Our team includes alumni of Microsoft and Amazon, where they worked on enterprise-scale AI products, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure serving millions of users. We know what "production AI" actually means — not a demo.

Practitioner, not theorist

We implement what we recommend

Unlike strategy consultants who hand you a report and leave, we can stay through implementation. When we recommend building a retrieval-augmented generation system or a fine-tuned model, we know what that actually costs in engineering time and compute — because we've done it.

Honest by design

We tell you when not to build

The most common outcome of a good AI advisory engagement is a shorter list of things to build. Most businesses don't need a custom LLM — they need a well-prompted API call and a good UI. We'll tell you which is which, and we don't get paid more for recommending complexity.

FAQ

Questions about AI advisory.

Not sure if this is the right fit? Email us — we'll tell you honestly.

We're not technical. Can you still help us?

Yes — this is often where we add the most value. If you have technical staff, we work with them directly. If you don't, we translate the technical reality into business decisions: what to buy, what to build, what questions to ask vendors, and what to prioritize. The deliverables are written in plain language your board can read.

How is this different from hiring an AI consultant from a big firm?

Large consulting firms typically send generalists who've recently upskilled in AI, and bill at $400–$600/hour. You get frameworks and slide decks. We're practitioners who have shipped real AI products, and we bill at rates a growing company can actually afford. We also stay through implementation — the strategy and the execution are the same engagement.

What industries do you work in?

We've worked across SaaS, professional services, e-commerce, and healthcare-adjacent industries. AI strategy principles transfer across sectors — what matters more is company stage (typically Series A to $30M ARR is our sweet spot) and whether the leadership team is ready to make real decisions, not just commission a report.

Can you help us evaluate a specific vendor or tool?

Yes — vendor evaluation is a common standalone engagement. We'll review the contract, benchmark the technical claims, run a proof of concept if warranted, and give you a written recommendation. We have no referral relationships with any AI vendor, so our assessment is genuinely independent.