Honest answers, no hedging. If your specific question isn't here, email hello@8bitconcepts.com — we'll add it.
Four to twelve weeks. Week one is interviews and workflow mapping with your operators — we sit with the people who run the work and ask which parts drive them crazy. Weeks two through eight are building production AI workflows alongside your team, with operators in the review loop catching things our eval harness wouldn't. Final two weeks are documentation, runbooks, training, and handoff.
Your team operates the system after we leave. We don't stay for retainer. If you want us to come back for a second workflow later, that's a new engagement.
Less than a senior AI engineer's first-year fully-loaded cost. Three engagement shapes:
Audit (2 weeks fixed) is the lowest entry point — workflow mapping, ranked opportunities, prioritized roadmap. Embedded Build (4–12 weeks weekly) is the most common — we ship 1–3 production AI workflows alongside your team. Build & Handoff (custom fixed) is for scoped single-system builds with clear deliverables.
We give you a real number on the 30-min intro call once we know shape. No "starting at" pricing on the website — the right number depends on your operation.
If you're in the Pacific Northwest outside Seattle, you can't realistically hire an AI engineer locally — only 1 of 25 named AI hiring hubs is in the PNW. (See The PNW AI Desert for the full data.) Even where you can hire, the cost-per-output of an embedded engagement is lower in year one because we ship working systems, not learning curves.
The bigger difference is what stays after we leave: runbooks, evaluation harness, and a team that can extend the system without us. A new hire takes 6–12 months to get there. We get you there in 4–12 weeks.
We don't deliver decks. The deliverable at the end of every engagement is working production code integrated into your existing systems, plus the runbooks and evaluation harness so your team operates it.
Strategy consultancies hand off implementation to a separate team. We are the implementation team — the same people who'd be in your codebase wrote our research papers and built our live AI products (see case studies).
We work on your infrastructure. Your data stays where it is — in your Postgres, your Salesforce, your Notion, your file storage. We don't pipe production data through our systems.
Where models need to be invoked, we use providers and configurations that match your engagement letter: no-train SLAs, regional residency, BAA when required for healthcare. All discussed and locked before code lands.
You don't need one to start. Most engagements begin with an audit week where we identify the highest-ROI workflows in your operation. The strategy emerges from what we find.
Operators who try to write the strategy first usually choose the wrong workflow. Mapping the actual operation surfaces the real opportunities — the ones a strategy memo would never name because they don't sound impressive enough.
We build evaluation infrastructure as part of every engagement — an eval harness with real cases from your operation that scores any change to the workflow before it touches a real customer. If a workflow doesn't pass eval, we don't ship it.
If a workflow ships and stops working post-handoff (model drift, vendor change, edge case), you have the eval harness to catch it. We include 30 days of post-handoff support; longer by arrangement.
For the deeper why-most-AI-deployments-fail picture: see The Context Wall.
First production workflow typically goes live in week 4–6 of an Embedded Build engagement. Operators usually report 5–10 hours per week reclaimed within two weeks of go-live.
The compounding gains show up later. By month 6 post-engagement, our deployments measure 2–3× customer load served at the same headcount. The compounding only happens if you route the new capacity into expansion work rather than absorb it into existing slack — which is the operational shift we sit with you through during the engagement.
Both. We're based in the Pacific Northwest and prefer in-person workshop weeks for the kickoff and the workflow-mapping interviews — the in-person time produces material that remote calls don't.
For PNW clients (Vancouver WA, Camas, Portland, Tigard) we default to in-person for the first and last weeks. Everywhere else we default remote with optional travel weeks.
Operating businesses 5–50 employees is our sweet spot. Smaller (1–5) usually doesn't have enough workflow density for the engagement to pay back inside year one. Larger (50+) works fine but the engagement shape is different — more stakeholders, longer scope.
Industry-fit is broader than size. Healthcare practices, professional services firms (law / accounting / insurance / financial advisory), manufacturers, distributors, logistics operators, creative agencies, specialty retail, and trades all work. If your team does repetitive cognitive work, we can find the workflow worth automating.
We have a $500 fixed-price AI Org Diagnostic for that exact moment. 30-minute conversation, then a written diagnosis with one specific structural recommendation for your operation.
No upsell baked in — the $500 covers the diagnostic itself. If it makes sense to do more work afterward, we discuss that separately.
NDAs yes, on first call if requested. BAAs yes, where required (healthcare practices). MSAs and standard professional services agreements are fine.
We've signed all of these before; nothing unusual will surprise our paperwork process. Our standard MSA is short and template-able if you don't have one.
Yes — that's the default. We've integrated AI workflows into Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, Airtable, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Postgres, custom homegrown systems. We don't require you to migrate to a different platform. No platform lock-in.
We will sometimes recommend small infrastructure additions (a queue, a structured retrieval surface, an eval harness) that didn't exist before the engagement. Those become yours and live in your stack.
You do. The engagement letter assigns IP for the workflow code, the eval harness, and the runbooks to you.
We retain the right to use general patterns and frameworks for future engagements (every consultancy does); your specific business logic, data shapes, and workflows are entirely yours.
If your question isn't here, the next step is a free 30-minute call. We'll tell you straight whether we can help, what shape the engagement should take, or who else you should talk to.