Should you hire us, or a bigger firm?

Three situations, and they're real. The first is a multi-year program running across several countries, where most of the difficulty is coordination rather than engineering. Second: a board or a regulator that wants a name it already trusts on the cover of the report. That isn't vanity, it's risk management, and it's worth paying for. The third is a rollout that needs forty people staffed by Monday.

None of that is our work, and pretending otherwise costs you a year. Call a Big-4 firm or a regional shop that staffs at that scale.

What the brand name doesn't buy is a working system. MIT's NANDA report found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable P&L return, and those pilots were not mostly run by amateurs. Ask the big firm the question you'd ask us: who writes the acceptance test, and what happens if the thing fails it?

If a product already does the job, buy the product. A CRM, a decent PSA, a scheduling tool, a document chatbot for a small library of PDFs. Configuring something that exists beats building something that doesn't, and a $99-a-month subscription beats a $40,000 MVP every time it fits.

No-code sits in the same bucket. It puts a working tool in front of real users in about a week. The Bright Byte reports that 25% to 30% of no-code builds get rewritten in custom code within two years, which also means roughly three quarters of them never do. Start there when the process is simple, the volume is low, and nobody's job depends on it running at 2 a.m.

The signal to build custom is the workaround spreadsheet. When one appears next to the tool, the tool stopped fitting.

If AI is going to be a permanent, central function rather than a project, hire for it. Own the roadmap, own the people, own the retraining cycle three years out. Nobody should rent that.

Know the bill first. Groovy Web puts an in-house AI team at $1M to $1.8M loaded in year one, with a three-to-six-month ramp before the first useful output. That's reasonable when AI is your product. It's a lot of money for one jammed workflow in accounts payable.

There's a middle answer people skip. Hire the team, and have someone outside build the first system while they ramp. MIT's NANDA report found that buying from a specialized vendor ships a working AI system about 67% of the time, roughly twice the rate of building it internally. You own the code either way, so the first build becomes the new team's starting point instead of their first six months.

Four conditions. One stalled pilot or one jammed workflow, small enough to say in a sentence. A P&L owner who will sit in the room and name the number. A willingness to shrink the scope until it's one thing. And a willingness to sign the acceptance test, which is the written definition of working that the build has to pass. Builds are priced at 10% to 20% of the measured annual value, never by the hour, and we work it until it passes your acceptance test.

The free way in is the AI Pilot Autopsy: two pages on why your pilot stalled and the two changes that unstick it, emailed back as a PDF. No form, no signup, no sequence. Ignore the reply and nothing chases you.

The paid way in is discovery. $2,500, about two weeks, and it produces the quantified annual dollar value of your best workflow plus the acceptance test for it. If discovery doesn't surface at least 10x the fee in quantified annual value, you don't pay. The documents are yours to take anywhere.

Most of the work happens over a call and a shared screen. In person around Irvine, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Anaheim and Tustin; remote-friendly anywhere in the US. More on the practice: AI consulting and the FAQ.