The consulting industry’s default for AI work assumes your team is a stakeholder. We assume they’re the co-builder. Everything that’s different about how we work flows from that.
A large consulting firm comes in. They scope a six- to twelve-month project. They bring their own data scientists, their own engineers, their own delivery managers. They build something impressive and put it into production. They invoice. They leave.
Six months later, your team needs to extend it — new data source, new edge case, new regulatory requirement. The person who built that part is on a different project for a different client now. Nobody on your team has the institutional knowledge of why decisions were made the way they were. The choice is to call the firm back at the same hourly rates, or live with a system you can’t modify.
This pattern repeats across the industry, and the AI version of it is worse than the previous waves of it, because the systems are more opaque and the decisions inside them have more consequences. Your team needed to be in the room when the decisions were made.
Most engagements move through some version of this sequence. Some skip phases; some loop back. The sequence is real, so we use numbers.
A 30-minute working session, free, to figure out whether you need us at all. Sometimes the answer is “not yet, here’s what to do first.” We say it when we find it.
Six weeks, flat fee. A phased roadmap a board can read. About a third of clients stop here, because the strategy work surfaces a cheaper path than the one they walked in with.
Where AI projects actually fail. Four to eight weeks of structured interviews and workflow observation with the people who do the work, producing the data foundation everything else depends on.
Implementation with your team in the room. Working sessions are co-led. Documentation is co-written. Everything we deliver, your team helped build and can extend without us.
Two-week structured transition. Your team takes over operations with us on call for a defined post-engagement window. After that, you don’t need us. That’s the deliverable.
“Stakeholder” is a word consultants use to keep people informed but not in the work. “Co-builder” is a word for the people who built it with us. Your domain experts attend the working sessions, not the readouts.
The model isn’t the deliverable. The capability inside your team to maintain, extend, and govern the model after we leave is the deliverable. Everything we do is measured against that.
We don’t hand you a binder at the end. Your team writes the documentation as the engagement happens, in their language, for the people in your organization who will inherit the work.
Open standards, vendor-neutral architecture. If you have AWS, we use AWS. If you have GCP, we use GCP. If you have on-prem, we use on-prem. We don’t bring a proprietary stack and we don’t leave you locked into one.
We don’t pre-sell the build before the strategy is done. If the strategy phase finds that the right answer is “buy this off-the-shelf product” or “don’t do this yet,” we say so. We’d rather lose the build contract than sell you the wrong one.
Bias evaluation, model cards, decision logs, audit trails — these are how we build, from the first sprint. Not a phase you bolt on before audit. Our sister firm Talent Echo handles the leadership search for this work; we share the philosophy.
Every engagement is scoped to a flat fee before we start. You know the price. Your CFO knows the price. Nothing inflates the price during the engagement — not new findings, not scope clarifications, not the bid for “additional discovery.”
We charge in thirds: a third at kickoff, a third at a defined midpoint milestone, a third at handoff. The model is the same one our sister firm Talent Echo uses for executive search, for the same reason: it aligns our incentive with delivering, not with billing.
Specific engagement pricing depends on scope and team size. We share that in the first conversation. It’s the second thing we discuss, after whether you need us at all.
One price for the engagement. No hourly billing. No timesheets that grow as the work does.
Kickoff, midpoint, handoff. Same model as Talent Echo, for the same reason.
No percentage of project budget. No bonuses that scale with how much we spend on your behalf.
If we can tell you in 30 minutes that you don’t need us, we’d rather you find that out from us than from a sunk cost six months in.
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