Paid Scoping Engagement
A six to eight week, fixed-fee engagement to put a defensible business case behind your first AI project. We pick one use case, pressure-test the ROI math, define a kill criterion, and hand you a written plan. Build it with us, build it with someone else, or kill it on purpose — we don't gate the deliverable behind a follow-on retainer.
Deliverables
- A 12–20 page scoping document with the use case, success metric, and kill criterion
- An honest ROI worksheet (build cost, run cost, change cost, risk reserve, year 1 and year 2 returns)
- A data-readiness assessment for the systems the project will touch
- An integration sketch — where AI outputs land, who consumes them, what changes operationally
- A vendor / build-vs-buy recommendation with named alternatives
- A 90-day pilot plan you can hand to your team or to another consultant
Pilot Build
An eight to twelve week, fixed-fee build. We take the scoping deliverable — yours or ours — and ship a working pilot end to end: data plumbing, model wiring, integration into the system your team actually uses, and the dashboards that prove it works. We instrument the kill criterion before launch and run it honestly. Hand-off to your team is in scope, not an upsell.
Deliverables
- A production pilot wired into one workflow (CRM, ticketing, ERP, internal tool, etc.)
- Data preparation and the pipelines that keep the data fresh
- Evaluation harness so you know when the model drifts
- An observability dashboard with the kill-criterion metric on it
- Operational runbook (what to do when it breaks, when to retrain, when to escalate)
- Two-week hand-off with one of your engineers paired to ours
Fractional AI Lead
A monthly retainer for companies who don't need a full-time head of AI yet. We sit on your leadership team a day or two a week, review vendor pitches, unblock pilots, write the strategy memos that get read at the board, and ship the boring 80% of the work that actually moves the metric. Three-month minimum so the work compounds; cancellable any month after that.
Deliverables
- Standing seat in your weekly leadership / product / data meeting
- One written memo per month on a current AI decision (build vs. buy, vendor selection, scope cut)
- Vendor pitch reviews — we sit in on demos and write up an honest assessment
- Direct unblocking work on whichever pilot is stuck that week
- An always-current AI roadmap document in a format your board can read
How to choose
If you're not sure which engagement is right, the answer is almost always Paid Scoping. It's the cheapest way to find out whether the project is real, and the deliverable carries forward whether you build with us or not. Most of our pilot builds and retainers start there.
Skip scoping only if you've already done the work yourself or with another partner and have a written plan you can defend at a CFO conversation. We're happy to look at it cold and quote a Pilot Build.
Read more about our pricing philosophy in how to hire an AI consultant and AI ROI for business leaders.
If you'd like a quick read on which engagement fits, book a free 30-minute call. We'll either point you at the right service or tell you you don't need us yet.