Competitive position
A grounded read on where your category is on the agent-adoption curve, who's moving, and where the next 24 months of advantage actually live. The kind of analysis worth showing your board.
Strategic AI Consulting · executive engagement
AI is on your board’s agenda. Make sure it’s the right conversation.
For executives who don’t need another deck — they need a partner who can read the actual market, the actual risk, and the actual capability of the AI tools their teams are being pitched. Principal-led, quarterly cadence, board-ready outputs.
What it’s not
Set the expectation up front.
- Not a slide-deck assembly line. Big firms produce a lot of paper. You get specific, defensible recommendations on the decisions that are actually in front of you.
- Not staff augmentation. You’re not paying for junior consultants to learn on your time. The principal does the work, end-to-end.
- Not vendor pitching. We’re not selling you software. The output is a recommendation; whether it ends with us building it, with another firm, or with you doing nothing is your call.
What it is
Strategic AI consulting for a real decision.
The conversations are concrete because the engagements are concrete. We don’t sell AI strategy as a category. We answer specific questions that are on your desk this quarter — the ones a deck won’t resolve.
Below: a representative sample of what those questions look like in the room.
The kinds of questions we work through
The decisions on your desk this quarter.
- Q · 01"We're being pitched by three AI vendors. Which is real, and what would you actually buy?"
- Q · 02"Our internal data team wants to build a custom RAG system. Should we, or should we license one?"
- Q · 03"Our ML model is failing in production. Is it a model problem or a data problem?"
- Q · 04"What's the realistic competitive picture in our category over 24 months?"
- Q · 05"Where would you spend the next $500K on AI? And what would you stop spending on?"
- Q · 06"Will our AI governance posture hold up to a regulator who asks how the agent made its decision?"
Six strategic surfaces
Where the engagement actually lands.
Most engagements work across two or three of these surfaces simultaneously. The audit determines which ones the firm needs us on, and how the work is sequenced.
Build vs. buy vs. wait
Per-capability decisions on which agentic capabilities to build internally, which to license, and which to deliberately defer. Reasoning is shown so stakeholders can challenge the recommendation.
Capital allocation
Where the marginal AI dollar should go this quarter. As budgets grow and politicize, the question of which spend is real ROI versus which is theater becomes the CEO's call.
Vendor evaluation
Independent due diligence on AI vendors and platforms being pitched to your team. Pitches are getting more sophisticated; the underlying technology is increasingly variable. We've seen behind the curtain on dozens of these.
Governance & risk
Architecture review, data-handling posture, audit trails, regulatory exposure (HIPAA, SOC 2, FINRA, state-level). The posture that lets you move fast without absorbing tail risk.
Org & talent
Where to staff against the AI surface, how to redesign roles around automation, what to stop doing first. Headcount math in an AI-native firm is different from headcount math in 2022.
The principal
Hands-on across both the strategic and technical surfaces.
Paul M. Washburn leads every engagement directly. He doesn’t just describe what should be built — he’s shipped agentic workflows and supervised models for middle-market firms across multiple verticals, debugged them in production, and owned the results. That dual-stack background — strategic and technical — is what makes the strategic recommendations defensible against challenge.
Published on competitive AI strategy, knowledge-graph infrastructure, and operating-model design. Front Range, Colorado. Engagements run remote-first with selective on-site sessions when the work warrants it.
How engagements work
Three formats. All start with the audit.
The format is matched to the shape of the decision. A specific question gets a sprint; an ongoing strategic relationship gets a retainer; a board-level alignment moment gets a briefing.
- 01
Single-decision sprint
Two weeks · written recommendation
A specific decision in front of the executive team. We work through it end-to-end and deliver a board-ready written recommendation. Engagement-based pricing — scope and fee agreed in the audit.
- 02
Quarterly retainer
Ongoing · quarterly cadence
Strategic AI advisor on retainer. Quarterly working sessions with the executive team, written briefs as decisions surface, on-call for vendor pitches and governance reviews. Engagement-based pricing.
- 03
Board / leadership briefing
One scheduled session · written brief in advance
A scheduled session with your board or executive team to align on the firm's strategic posture toward AI. Includes a written brief delivered before the session so the conversation is informed, not introductory.
Common questions
The questions executives actually ask.
- How is this different from McKinsey, BCG, or Accenture?
- They have hundreds of consultants and a deep bench of frameworks. We have one principal with hands-on technical depth and lower overhead. The output is the same shape — a defended recommendation. The cost is a fraction. And the depth is often greater because the recommendation comes from someone who has actually built what's being recommended.
- Do you write the code yourself?
- Yes. Every engagement, the principal owns the technical work end-to-end. No juniors learning on your time. That's also why engagement scope is bounded — capacity is a real constraint, and we'd rather work fewer engagements deeply than many shallowly.
- Can we engage on a single decision rather than ongoing?
- Yes. The single-decision sprint is built for exactly this. Two weeks, written recommendation, no retainer required. Many of our quarterly relationships started as a single sprint.
- What if you're not the right partner for our specific decision?
- We'll say so. The audit fee structure ($499 if we're not a fit, $999 down payment if we are) is designed around this case. We'd rather refer you to someone who can actually help than charge for an engagement that won't pay back.
- How do we know you're objective on vendor evaluations?
- We don't take referral fees from AI vendors. Our incentive is the quality of your decision, not theirs. If a vendor is the right choice, we'll say so plainly; if a different one is, we'll say so just as plainly.
- What's the typical engagement size?
- Single-decision sprints land in the low five figures. Quarterly retainers vary based on cadence and scope but are designed to be small relative to the strategic exposure they're advising on. Final pricing is agreed in the audit so the first commitment is well-bounded.
- Will the recommendation include implementation?
- Optional. The strategic engagement and the build engagement are separate; many clients work with us on strategy and choose a different partner for build, or vice versa. We'll tell you which makes sense given the work in front of you.
Start the conversation
One audit. One decision. From there.
Every engagement begins with the same structured audit: a 1–2 hour discovery meeting, $499 if we’re not a fit, $999 down payment toward the engagement if we are. Either way, you leave with a clear read on whether strategic AI consulting is the right tool for the decision in front of you.