AI consulting for companies
Guardrails and a plan for the AI tools your people are already building
Who this is for
- Your people use Claude or ChatGPT at work, and one or two have gone further, building reports, automations, or a connection to your own data.
- You have no development team, or yours is busy elsewhere, and what has been built depends on the people who built it.
- You want more of your team using it, but you are not yet sure the numbers it gives are right, or who should be able to see what.
The steps
Each step's fee comes off the next, so starting small costs you nothing if you go further.
Step 1
Team working session
$495
Two hours, up to four people
A first look at how your people use AI tools today, and the quickest way to find out whether the bigger steps are worth it.
- Two hours live with up to four of your people
- A look at the tools they use, what they have built, and where their time goes
- Written notes afterward on the quick wins you can make straight away
- The risks worth fixing first, in order
- A straight answer on whether Foundations and roadmap is worth doing for you
If you go on to Foundations and roadmap, the $495 comes off it.
Step 2
Foundations and roadmap
$3,500
About two weeks
We review what you have built and talk with two or three of the people involved. You get a written report and a one-hour walkthrough with anyone you want there.
- How your data should be reached: checked definitions for figures like revenue, access limited by team, read-only by default, and a record of what gets asked
- How your skills and prompts should be split up, versioned, and shared, so everyone works from the approved version
- How your automations move off personal accounts, so they keep running when someone is away
- A short AI use policy: what data goes where, which reports count as trusted, and how they are checked
- Your wish list ranked by return, effort, and risk, with a measure for each, who would look after it, and what it would cost to run
If you go on to a first build, the $3,500 comes off it.
Step 3
First build
Fixed price
Quoted from the roadmap
We build the first item on the roadmap properly, with the guardrails it needs, and leave it in a state your team can run.
- A fixed price and a written scope before any work starts
- The guardrails it needs from the roadmap, in place before it touches live data
- Testing against your own real cases before it goes live
- Monitoring once it is running, and a measure taken beforehand so you can see what it changed
- A handoff your team can look after: how it works, how to change it, and what to watch
A first build might draft replies to customer questions from your own order data for staff to check and send, chase overdue items with scheduled follow-ups, turn public product listings into a cited research report, or get a software team working well with AI coding agents.
After that
If the first build works, we can keep building through the roadmap, review what your own people build, and help each piece roll out. We size that once the roadmap is written. One outside person cannot build everything a company needs, so part of the aim is setting up your own people to build safely within the guardrails.
How we keep it safe
- The AI reads your systems and does not change them. Anything that would change a record goes through a person and your system's own checks.
- Figures that drive decisions, such as revenue or stock on hand, are defined once where the data lives, so every question counts them the same way.
- Each team reaches only the data it needs.
- Anything that goes to a customer or a supplier is approved by a person at first, and stays that way until you decide otherwise.
- Work that runs on its own uses its own account with a spending limit and alerts, so hitting a limit pauses a queue rather than someone's day.
- We sign a non-disclosure agreement before seeing anything proprietary, and we work from read-only access or a screen share.
Questions
- What do you need from us?
- Read-only access to what has been built, or a screen share, and time with the two or three people who know it best.
- How do the conversations fit around our day?
- We agree the schedule with you at the start. The conversations are short, and most of them can happen in writing if that suits your people better.
- How is it paid?
- Each step is invoiced by Clocktower and Associates before it starts, and each step's fee comes off the next.
- We are a software team. Does this still apply?
- Yes. The review covers how your developers use AI coding and agent tools, and a first build might be onboarding the team or setting up several agents to work in one codebase.
- I only want someone to look at my own work.
- Then an AI consulting session is the better start.
Tell us what your team has built so far
A few lines on what you have built, what you want next, and what worries you about opening it up is enough to start. We read every message ourselves.