AI strategy and advisory services
Most AI consulting ends with a recommendation and an invoice. Ours ends with something running in your business that we are still responsible for a year later. That difference changes what we are willing to put on the roadmap.
We have to live with what we recommend
A consultant who leaves after the recommendation carries none of the consequences of it being wrong. We build the thing, we maintain it as your systems change, and we are the ones you call when it stops behaving.
That makes us conservative in a useful way. We are not incentivized to put an impressive-sounding automation on your roadmap that will be a support burden for the next three years.
It also means the advice is grounded in your actual environment rather than a generic maturity model, because we are a managed IT provider and running business systems is the day job. It is AI strategy consulting with the consequences attached.
Ongoing, not an engagement with an end date
Strategy that keeps going
Not a one-off engagement that ends in a document. The workshops, the assessments, and the roadmap reviews are ongoing and part of the program.
A roadmap your leadership owns
Reviewed and updated with your team, so the sequence reflects what the business is actually trying to do this year rather than what looked exciting in a workshop.
The people who do the work
A business process analyst on the front end, and AI automation engineers who build. It is a staffed department, and it is still growing.
Advice that includes not buying
Sometimes the answer is to fix the process. Sometimes it is a product already on the market, and we will help you assess it rather than build you a worse version.
The advice usually starts with a governance problem
Most businesses come to us before any automation question: staff already using AI on personal accounts, no policy anyone follows, and company information going somewhere nobody can name. So the first advisory work is usually there. What your team is actually using, what your acceptable use policy should say, and what is safe to connect.
Once that's standing, the conversation turns to the roadmap and the sequencing: what pays first, what to fix instead of automate, and what to buy off the shelf.
How we govern AI, and the free policy template →Your vCIO already owns the technology plan
For managed and co-managed clients, AI strategy sits inside a relationship that already exists. Your vCIO, the dedicated advisor who owns your technology roadmap, budget, and risk conversation, folds AI into that plan, and the AI department does the delivery work behind it.
If ASG doesn't run your IT, this still works. You just get the AI side on its own.
How the vCIO relationship works →Where automation pays off in businesses like yours
Ten short guides, one per industry: the workflows that eat the most time and what AI and automation can do about them. Pick yours and we'll email it to you.
The questions people actually ask
- Is AI transformation just automation with a new name?
- Not much anymore, and that's the honest answer. Digital transformation used to mean moving off paper and onto software. Now that the software can reason, the interesting question is whether your processes still need a person doing the routine part. Most people saying AI transformation mean the second thing. We use the words interchangeably because our clients do.
- How is this different from hiring a transformation consultant?
- The large consultancies use business transformation for engagements that touch strategy, operating model, and org design, usually at enterprise scale and enterprise cost. What we do is narrower and more concrete: we map your actual processes, then build and run the automations worth building. If you need someone to redesign your org chart, we're not that firm.
- Why do so many transformation projects fail?
- In our experience it's because they start with a tool somebody bought and then hunt for a problem to point it at. The process never got examined, so the software gets bolted onto the same broken sequence and makes it faster rather than better. That's the entire reason we map first and why we'll tell you when a process needs fixing instead of automating.
- Do we have to be a managed IT client of yours?
- No. Plenty of businesses buy the program on its own. It does work better alongside managed IT, because governing AI means controlling identity, access, and the systems it connects to, and if we already run those there's nothing to wire up first.
- What does it cost?
- It's quoted against your environment, the same way we quote compliance and project work, because the answer genuinely depends on how many people you have and how much of your business you want to put through this. The larger initiatives off the roadmap are scoped and priced one at a time, so you approve each on its own merits.
Get an honest read on where AI would actually pay
Book 30 minutes with a strategic advisor, or take the two-minute AI Maturity Assessment first. Either way you get a straight answer about what's worth doing.