Fifty-seven percent of small businesses are paying for AI. Seven percent have it doing real work in their operations. The rest are running it on the side — with no way to tell whether it's adding real value.
Federal Reserve, 2026. Reimagine Main Street & PayPal, 2025.
They're saving time. They don't know if they're saving money.
Enterprise spent two years and hundreds of billions of dollars learning a hard lesson: you cannot bolt AI onto a workflow that nobody has ever bothered to map. Ninety-five percent of generative AI pilots fail. Eighty-eight percent of organizations use AI tools; only six percent see measurable financial returns. That's the boardroom story.
The small-business story is quieter, and more insidious. You started with the free tier of ChatGPT. Then somebody bought Copilot. Then your CRM grew an AI feature, and your accounting software grew one, and the line items added up. Workers report saving five-and-a-half hours a week. Managers report seven. Nobody — and the data is unambiguous on this — has measured what any of it costs or earns.
You have no baseline. You have no instrumentation. You have no operational visibility, because no one has ever sat beside you for a week and written down how the work actually flows. You can't automate what you haven't mapped. So you end up paying for software that runs in parallel to a business you can't see.
We fix that. Not with a strategy deck. With ethnography, instrumentation, and a dashboard that stays.
We sit beside you for a week and document how work actually happens — not how the org chart says it happens.
Every workflow gets an AI insertion score. Where leverage is real, where it's theater, where it's outright dangerous to deploy.
A dashboard that stays with you. Workflow health, AI utilization, time saved, anomalies — visible and ongoing.
We work with the people the consulting industry forgot. Main-street businesses getting squeezed by landlords pricing for multinationals. Family practices competing against PE-rolled-up regionals. Solo operators wearing five hats and being told by everyone with a podcast that AI will save them — without anyone showing how.
The methodology comes from twenty years studying enterprise. The price point is what's new.
If you have boardroom slides for your AI strategy and a procurement department to negotiate it, we are not for you. The Big Four can have you.
I spent twenty years studying how work actually happens inside large organizations. ADP. Chase. Condé Nast. The studies were not commissioned — I did them because nobody else was, and the executive teams paid attention because the findings restructured how the work got done.
Small businesses have never had access to this kind of work. Not because the methodology doesn't apply — it does — but because the price tag was always wrong. AI has changed the math. One human plus one large language model can deliver what used to take a team of five.
That's how this business runs. It's also what we're selling. The dashboard you'd subscribe to is the same one we use to operate. Every part of our pipeline is the product.
Three questions. We read every one. If we're a fit, we'll send a scoped proposal within a day.
Thank you. We'll be in touch within a day.
A real person reads every one of these.