Engagement Timeline.

The firm has watched competitors talk about AI for two years and feels behind. Leadership is not sure whether to hire an AI lead, buy off-the-shelf tools, or wait. The engagement runs four to six weeks: structured interviews with operational leads, a readiness assessment, and a written deliverable identifying the two or three highest-leverage opportunities, a build/buy/partner recommendation for each, and a phased plan. By the end, the firm has a defensible position to take to its board, including, often, a recommendation not to act on certain opportunities yet.

The company's technical service team fields hundreds of repeat questions a month, most of which are answered somewhere in 20 years of accumulated PDFs, emails, and shop-floor notes. The engagement covers source document curation, retrieval-augmented generation pipeline design, evaluation against a held-out set of real questions, integration with the team's existing ticketing tool, and two training sessions for the people who will own it day to day. Six to ten weeks. Deliverable: a working pipeline, documentation, and a team trained to maintain it. A 30-day stabilization period follows deployment.

The company inspects a narrow class of mechanical parts where defects are rare, geometrically subtle, and not represented in any public dataset. Standard vision APIs miss them. This is the case where Build is genuinely warranted. The engagement covers dataset construction, custom model development, validation against the company's existing inspection criteria, and production handoff with full documentation. Most prospective clients are talked out of Build engagements during scoping. Build is reserved for problems where off-the-shelf options have been tested and found insufficient. A 30-day stabilization period follows deployment.

A small operations team deployed an internal AI assistant a year and a half ago. Initial results were strong, but no one has audited it since. Users have quietly stopped using parts of it. Others rely on outputs that may have drifted. The Sustain engagement covers a structured evaluation against original success metrics, identification of drift or degraded performance, recommended fixes, and a maintenance cadence that does not require a full-time hire. Sustain often runs as a recurring quarterly check-in rather than a one-time project.