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The hype merchant.
Sells you on AI's promise, hands you a roadmap, and is gone before anything runs. You paid for a vision; you got a PDF.
Advice that never shipsYou're being sold AI from every direction — and you're the one who has to bet a budget on it. So you fund a strategy that never becomes software, or greenlight a demo that can't survive real users. The spend is real, the results aren't, and now you're not sure who to trust.
Sells you on AI's promise, hands you a roadmap, and is gone before anything runs. You paid for a vision; you got a PDF.
Advice that never shipsIncredible in the pitch. Then real users and real data hit it, and it falls apart. It was built to impress a room, not to run in production.
Impressive until it's live“ Most AI projects are theater — they look like progress and move nothing. The ones that pay off get built, shipped, and measured.
No open-ended roadmap, no blind spec-taking. We start with an honest audit, pick the one thing worth building, and ship it — small scope, real production, measured.
We map where AI actually pays off in your business, and flag the theater you're being sold. You get a straight answer — even if it's "don't."
We pick the one build with the clearest payoff — pipeline, response time, hours back — and scope it tight.
That one thing, in production. Not a demo, not a sandbox pilot — the real thing, doing real work.
We watch the number. The only definition of "it worked" that counts is: the number moved, and you know we moved it.
No projections, no theater — real output. We took a six-person software engineering team's workload and delivered it with a single AI-enabled developer: the same shipped software, at a fraction of the cost — no six salaries, no six-month ramp, no coordination overhead. That's how we build. And we're doing it again in production right now — an AI outbound engine for a B2B water-quality company, live in their pipeline.
The track record behind it:
A decade shipping production software. This isn't strategy with a technical vocabulary — we write the code.
Years architecting software in production. We know where AI earns its keep and where it's a liability — so we can tell hype from real.
No theater. Advice you can act on, builds that go live, and numbers you can check — not slideware.
Operators and founders at real, revenue-generating companies who feel the pressure to "do something with AI" but don't want to torch a budget — or hire a team — to find out what. If you've got a metric you want moved and zero patience for AI theater, that's us. If you want a slide deck or a science project, it isn't.
No. The reality check ends in a build, not a bill for more meetings. The advice exists to aim the build — and if there's nothing worth building, we tell you that instead of selling you a retainer.
Then that's the answer, and the teardown just saved you a budget. We'd rather tell you no than ship theater you'll rip out in six months. That's the whole point of starting with a reality check.
We scope small and ship to production fast, specifically so "did it work" is answered in weeks, not quarters — and it's answered by a number, not a vibe. And if the number doesn't move, we keep iterating at no extra build cost until it does, or we agree to stop — you're never stuck paying for a dud.
The AI Reality Check is fixed-price — $2,500, credited toward the build if you proceed. Builds are scoped to the number you're chasing. The Fractional Head of AI seat runs $8k–$25k/mo depending on how much of your AI function you want us owning.
Yes. We build in your environment where it matters, scope data access to only what the build needs, and the code and IP are yours. We're engineers — we treat your data and systems the way we treat our own production.
Both, in that order. The advice is there to aim the build — you leave with working software in production, not a roadmap and a handshake.