AI advisory · built, not pitched

Most companies are still deciding. You could be operating.

The tools on the shelf today are more capable than the work most companies give them, and tuned to how you actually run, they pay off in weeks. What stands between you and that is usually a meeting, not the technology.

Start with the problem →
The same few rooms

Most companies are stuck in one of the same few places.

The licenses got bought. The whole team has access. Months in, the boldest thing anyone does with it is summarize a meeting.

There was a strategy. There was a committee. The deck looked sharp, everyone nodded, and nothing shipped.

Years of data sit in the building, the kind every article calls gold. It is scattered across a dozen systems and nobody can point a model at it.

The dev team has been meaning to adopt AI since the first model dropped. They are still meaning to.

Someone spent months building the AI thing. It works. Nobody knows what to do with it.

AI is in every meeting and every tool. Nothing is moving faster.

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The turn

Different rooms, the same problem. None of it is about the technology. It is about how the work is set up. Every month it sits there, someone faster pulls ahead. Closing that gap is the whole job.

What this looks like

A nine-month plan, done in weeks

9 months planned · weeks to done

A business could not see itself. Everything that mattered was buried in a legacy ERP two decades old, and nobody could get a clean answer out of it. The development team had a plan. First purge the data. Then sort the good from the bad. Then stage it. Then, maybe, bring in a model. Then, if that worked, train it. Then the next thing, and the next. Nine months of "if this succeeds, we earn the right to try the next step." Well into six figures. A maybe at the end.

I did not accept the plan. Not because the work was beneath anyone, but because it solved the problem in the least direct way there was. So I went the other way. Problem by problem, with tools that already existed, wired together, sometimes agents from different vendors each doing the piece it was best at, chipping the real thing down one cut at a time. Weeks later the outcome that team hoped to approach in nine months was done. Not demonstrated. Done, and running in production. And it was not a one-off. The same shape keeps showing up, and taking it apart is most of what I do.

That is the method in one story. Most of what looks like a hard build is a decision problem in a hard build's clothes. The work is telling the difference fast, moving on the part that is already solvable, and building the part that genuinely is not. I will not let a company freeze a win for ten months chasing perfect when good is sitting on the shelf today.

What I do

Spotting the change everyone else walked past

Most of what your people are stuck on is a slight change in how the work flows and a tool you already pay for. Not a build. The hard part was never the technology. It is spotting the change everyone else walked past, and that is what I do.

I find the real problem, solve it fast, and build it to last. I do the work myself, so the person you talk to is the person who builds it. Then I hand your team the playbook and get out of the way.

I frame the real problem, map how the work actually runs, isolate the one workflow worth proving first, build it in your live environment, and prove it with numbers your leadership can scale on.

What you get

Something that works the day it ships

Whatever I build works the day it ships and is built to be built on. Not a demo that wins the room and dies in production. Not a platform your team rips out in a year. Real value now, on a foundation that holds.

I cannot hand you everything in thirty days. I can hand you something that works now and grows from there, instead of something you throw away.

Who this is for

Companies that want to run leaner and faster with AI on the inside. I make the work your team already does quicker and cheaper. I do not build AI products for you to sell to your customers, that is a different business. If you have bought the tools, or built something, and still cannot get value out of either, that is the gap I close. You do not need a bigger budget. You need the judgment to see what actually matters and the hands to ship it.

How I work

How I work

There is a method behind this, not a knack. The same five stages run every engagement, whether the problem takes a week or a quarter. Here is the method, and here is how you buy it.

The Coherive Method

A repeatable way to take a stalled or scattered AI effort and bring it to one proven, working system, built inside your real operation, not a demo.

Before any work starts, I break the problem into four questions. Most organizations never answer these cleanly, and that is usually why they are stuck.

Outcome

What result do you want, and how will we measure it?

Workflow

Whose work actually changes?

Constraint

What is the one real thing in the way? Usually the data, a rule, or trust. Rarely the technology.

Proof

What evidence would make leadership act?

The deconstruction is the differentiator. The five stages are just how it gets executed.

The five stages
01

Frame

Get to the real problem behind the stated one, and define what working means in numbers. You leave with a one-page problem frame.

02

Map

Walk the workflow as it actually runs. Separate what is a tooling problem from what is a process problem, because most stalls are the second kind. You leave with a current-state map.

03

Isolate

Pick the one workflow with the most upside and the least risk to prove first. Bounded scope, a metric, a date. You leave with a scoped sprint.

04

Build

Stand it up inside your real operation, with real constraints and real people. Not a demo. You leave with a live workflow.

05

Prove

Measure against the baseline and hand your leadership evidence they can defend in a room. You leave with before and after numbers, plus the path to scale.

I frame the real problem, map how the work actually runs, isolate the one workflow worth proving first, build it in your live environment, and prove it with numbers your leadership can scale on.

The thing you are actually afraid of

Hallucination is real. It is also a design problem.

You have heard the stories. The AI stated something false with full confidence and someone nearly acted on it. That fear is legitimate, and most AI advice waves it away. I will not.

You hold it down by grounding the model in your own data, constraining it to sources it can point back to, and building a check into the steps where being wrong is expensive. You do not get rid of the risk by hoping. You engineer it down to where it is safe for the job, and you verify the places that matter.

Used that way, AI can be pointed at real, messy, complex data. The fear is reasonable. Staying out because of it is not.

How an engagement runs

How an engagement runs

Diagnostic

Start with a diagnostic

Every engagement starts here. One to two weeks, fixed fee. I get into how the work actually runs and find the real problem under the noise. You walk away with the real problem named, the one workflow worth proving first, and a fixed price for the build. No open-ended discovery. No surprise invoice. If the honest answer is a twenty-five dollar subscription and a week of setup, I will tell you that, and you will still have gotten your money's worth.

Build

Then the build

If there is something to build, I build it. The scope, the price, and the timeline all come out of the diagnostic, because I will not put a number on work before I understand it. You get a working tool, end to end, plus the documentation and the playbook your team needs to run it without me. It works when it ships, and it is built so your team can extend it. Nothing here is a throwaway.

Handoff

The handoff

The goal is for you to stop paying me. I solve the problem and hand your team the platform and the playbook to carry it forward. If a new problem shows up later, you know where I am. But I am not built to live on your invoice, and you should be wary of anyone who is.

Cost

What it costs

I price the outcome, not the hours. A diagnostic runs in one range, a build in another, and you know the number before the work starts. You are not buying my time. You are buying the judgment to find the real problem and the hands to solve it. The diagnostic is deliberately low risk. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the rest is worth doing.

Cadence

How I work

Most of the work happens heads down, where the real progress gets made. We meet when it moves the work forward, scheduled so it has full attention on both sides. You are buying a delivered outcome on a date, not hours on a calendar.

About

Who you are working with

Diagnostic

Start with a diagnostic

Every engagement starts here. One to two weeks, fixed fee. I get into how the work actually runs and find the real problem under the noise. You walk away with the real problem named, the one workflow worth proving first, and a fixed price for the build. No open-ended discovery. No surprise invoice. If the honest answer is a twenty-five dollar subscription and a week of setup, I will tell you that, and you will still have gotten your money's worth.

Build

Then the build

If there is something to build, I build it. The scope, the price, and the timeline all come out of the diagnostic, because I will not put a number on work before I understand it. You get a working tool, end to end, plus the documentation and the playbook your team needs to run it without me. It works when it ships, and it is built so your team can extend it. Nothing here is a throwaway.

Handoff

The handoff

The goal is for you to stop paying me. I solve the problem and hand your team the platform and the playbook to carry it forward. If a new problem shows up later, you know where I am. But I am not built to live on your invoice, and you should be wary of anyone who is.

Cost

What it costs

I price the outcome, not the hours. A diagnostic runs in one range, a build in another, and you know the number before the work starts. You are not buying my time. You are buying the judgment to find the real problem and the hands to solve it. The diagnostic is deliberately low risk. It is the cheapest way to find out whether the rest is worth doing.

Cadence

How I work

Most of the work happens heads down, where the real progress gets made. We meet when it moves the work forward, scheduled so it has full attention on both sides. You are buying a delivered outcome on a date, not hours on a calendar.

Start with the problem

Tell me what is stuck. If I can help, I will tell you how. If I cannot, I will tell you that too.

The fastest way to find out if I can help is to describe the actual problem, not a cleaned-up version of it. If I can help, I will tell you how and roughly what it would cost. If I cannot, I will tell you that, and most likely point you somewhere better.

Emaileric@coherive.com
Phone(617) 468-8964
Book a working call →