AI consulting in Houston, TX
Most AI consulting sells a pilot. We pick one repetitive, expensive decision, put it on firmer footing, and let you judge it in two weeks.
Our AI assistant asks about your project and can build you a free plan.
What we mean by AI here
For a business your size, useful AI is narrower and duller than a chatbot on your website. It looks like a forecast given as a range, an automation that removes a two-day task that keeps coming back, or a model that flags something worth a look before it becomes a problem.
We use the word because it is what people search for. The work itself is statistics, engineering and a lot of arguing about what the data means.
Why AI projects fail at a small business
An AI project fails for one of three reasons.
First, the data does not exist yet. Nobody can forecast what nobody recorded. Sometimes the answer is "you need six months of clean history first", and we say so early, while hearing it costs you less.
Second, nobody was making the decision on purpose in the first place. If nobody can say how the schedule gets decided today, no model can improve it, because there is nothing to compare against.
Third, the tool works and nobody uses it. We design hardest against this one, because a tool nobody opens has failed, however good its numbers are.
A worked example
Say a Houston distributor sets reorder points from average supplier lead time. The average is eleven days, so the reorder point assumes eleven days. Twice a year a supplier takes twenty-six, and both times the branch runs out of the thing that pays the rent.
Building the model takes less work than deciding what the business wants to do about those slow deliveries: hold more stock, hold extra only for the two suppliers who cause the problem, or accept the stockout and plan around it. Each answer is defensible, and each costs a different amount of money. We put a number on each one, and you make the call.
That work usually starts as a forecast and becomes an automation once somebody trusts it.
What we will not do
We will not sell you a pilot whose success criteria get written after it ends, or put a model into a decision nobody makes on purpose today. And we do not build things that only run while we are watching them.
We also turn down projects where the right first step is "hire someone to enter the data properly for six months". We cannot bill for that advice, which is a good reason to trust it when you hear it.
The language the tool is used in
In Houston, the person who opens the screen every morning (the scheduler, the shop supervisor, the dispatcher) may work in Spanish first, while the person buying the project works in English.
When the labels are in the buyer's language and the operator thinks in another, people find ways around the tool. We build the interface, the handover guide and the walkthrough in the language the people using it speak, and in both when there are two different languages. Nobody on our team translates from a dictionary.
What a first project looks like
A first project covers one decision, takes three to four weeks and has a fixed scope, with a written statement of what is included and what is not. You use the working tool for a week before anyone mentions a second project.
We do not start with a retainer. If a monthly care plan makes sense afterwards, that is a separate conversation with its own scope.
Questions people ask
Is our data good enough?
Usually it is good enough for something narrower than you were hoping. You get that answer on the first call, without a discovery phase first.
Will you train our team or just hand over a black box?
We train through the handover: every fixed-scope package includes a handover guide and a recorded walkthrough, in English, Spanish or both. If a tool only works while we are around, we are not finished.
Do you use large language models?
Yes, where they fit, which is mostly reading piles of text nobody has time to read. For forecasting and optimization they are usually the wrong tool, and we will tell you so.
What if we do not need AI at all?
Then we tell you so. That beats a project that does not pay for itself.
Have a decision worth getting right?
Tell us the decision you're trying to make. If we're not the right people, we'll say so.
Our AI assistant asks about your project and can build you a free plan.