The default AI engagement still looks like 2024.
Six-week discovery, vendor shortlist, pilot scoped to a tame slice of the workflow, and an internal champion who slowly loses the political will to push it through.
What you're left with: a deck, a stalled procurement process, and a team that has now been told three times that AI is a year away. We've seen this at Series A startups and at insurance carriers. The shape doesn't change.
A small number of senior people. Inside the business.
The companies pulling ahead share a pattern: a few seniors inside the business who have built AI systems at scale, paired with external operators who can move faster than a hire would and who leave a working handoff behind.
They are not running 12-month transformations. They are shipping one workflow at a time, behind a real trigger, with eval coverage that catches regressions before customers do. The compounding starts at workflow three or four.
The first AI workflow takes six weeks. The second takes three. By the fifth, the team is shipping them without us — and that's the goal.
Pattern we keep seeing
We finish. We tell the truth. We don't pyramid.
Three rules we wrote down because each one is the one most consultancies break.
- —We finish.If the work isn't running in production on the last day of the engagement, we didn't finish. Prototypes are not a deliverable.
- —We tell the truth.Including when the truth is "this isn't ready yet." We'd rather lose the build than burn your money on a workflow that the data can't support.
- —We don't pyramid.The senior on the call is the senior on the build. No junior team takes over in week two. This is why the model doesn't scale the way agencies want it to — and why the work lands.
Tell us about one workflow. We'll tell you the truth.
A two-week audit will get you a candid read on whether the workflow is ready to automate, what it would cost to ship, and whether you should hire instead of engaging us.
Describe a workflow