AI Assessment
A fixed-scope diagnosis of where AI creates real value in your operation, quantified in hours and dollars, with a written roadmap you keep. Every engagement starts here.
Production AI systems for Dallas / Fort Worth, built and operated by one senior engineer.
I assess where AI actually creates value in your operation, build the systems that earn their place, and then operate them, so they're still working correctly a year later, after the models they were built on have been replaced twice. Delivery to the metroplex is remote-first, which costs you nothing that matters: the work lives in your systems, and you get the senior engineer on every call instead of whoever the firm had free that week.
Paid assessment from $2,500 · Serving the DFW metroplex · Remote-first delivery
~8.5M
People in the DFW metro
24
Fortune 500 headquarters
90 mi
From Lindale, east on I-20
30 yrs
In technology · 10 in SRE
Dallas has no shortage of AI consultancies. It has a shortage of engineers who stay.
Dallas / Fort Worth is the largest economy in Texas and one of the largest in the country. Twenty-four Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here. Around them sits everything that actually makes the metroplex work: machine shops and manufacturers spread through the mid-cities, distribution and logistics operations stacked along I-35 and around both airports, the insurance and banking back offices that employ thousands of people moving documents, and the healthcare administration groups, professional firms, and energy companies that fill in the rest.
That density cuts both ways. Every national consultancy has a Dallas office, and nearly every one of them is aimed at those twenty-four companies. A two-hundred-person distributor in Grand Prairie gets the same brand name, the same pitch deck, and a delivery team of consultants two years out of school, because the senior people are allocated to the accounts that pay for the building. The problem in Dallas isn't access to AI help. It's getting seniority that stays through the two phases where it decides the outcome: the build, and the year after it.
There is no bench here and no handoff at go-live. The person on the sales call is the person who writes the code, and the person who gets paged at 2 a.m. in year two.
I'm Byron Walker, a Staff Site Reliability Engineer with thirty years in technology and a decade spent keeping large enterprise systems online. That background is the whole argument. Most AI projects don't fail at the demo. They fail at 2 a.m. three months later, when a model update shifts behavior or an upstream schema changes and nothing throws an exception. I build AI systems the way production infrastructure gets built: instrumented, independently verified, and honest about what they got wrong. Then I operate them, because a system nobody maintains is a system quietly going out of date.
On the geography, since it will come up: I'm in Lindale, ninety miles east of downtown Dallas on I-20. I'm not going to call that local, and I'm not going to bill you for windshield time. Discovery runs on video calls and screen shares, which is where this work actually lives, because what I need to see is your ticket queue, your shared inbox, and the spreadsheet somebody has rebuilt three times. None of that is in your lobby.
The assessment decides which of these matter.
Not a menu to shop from. These are the categories the work falls into, and for most companies, the honest answer is that two of them matter and the rest don't.
Document & Data Pipelines
Invoices, claims, policy documents, bills of lading, and contracts read, extracted, validated, and written into your systems of record, with confidence thresholds that route exceptions to a human instead of guessing.
Agent Systems
Multiple agents with separated responsibilities: detect, decide, act, and independently verify the work happened. Verification is its own agent, not the actor grading itself.
Systems Integration
Wired into your ERP, warehouse system, CRM, ticketing, and the internal tool from 2011 that nobody documented and nobody can replace this year.
Custom Software
Purpose-built internal applications and customer-facing products for how your business actually runs, designed and coded, not templated.
Operate & Maintain
The part nobody else stays for: 24/7 monitoring with degradation alerting, model migration against a regression suite, and a monthly report that shows the failures.
Metroplex companies too small to be a national firm's priority and too complex to do this in house.
Roughly 50 to 500 employees. Manufacturers and machine shops where quoting, POs, and job documentation move between systems by hand. Distribution, 3PL, and freight operations along I-35 and the airport corridors, with order-to-cash processes that consume more people than anyone has counted. Insurance and financial back offices where a document queue is the whole job. Healthcare administration groups buried in credentialing paperwork, vendor invoicing, and supply-chain documents, meaning the non-clinical side; patient data stays out of scope by design. Professional firms where intake and document review consume billable capacity.
The common thread isn't industry. It's a process that's expensive, high-volume, currently done by people doing the same thing repeatedly, and important enough that getting it quietly wrong would be a serious problem. That last part is why verification architecture is the center of how I build rather than a feature bolted on at the end.
Nothing I build fails silently. You get a monthly report of what ran, what escalated, and what it got wrong, with the receipts. The wrong-answer section is in every report, including the clean months.
Everything ships in your accounts, in your name, with documentation and team handoff at delivery. No proprietary runtime, no black-box middleware. If you cancel the retainer, the system keeps running and any competent engineer can pick it up. That's a deliberate design constraint, not an accident, and it is the part a firm with a Dallas office has the least incentive to give you.
See the standard every system I build reports against on the reliability page, a working demonstration of the verification architecture, including a button that injects a silent failure so you can watch it get caught. The incident platform case study covers how agents with real authority get built and verified, and engagement pricing is published in the open.
Dallas / Fort Worth AI consulting, answered plainly.
Are you actually based in Dallas?
No, and I'd rather say so on the first page you read than have you find out later. I'm in Lindale, ninety miles east on I-20. Delivery to the metroplex is remote-first by design. A satellite address would not make the systems any better, and pretending otherwise is exactly the kind of small dishonesty that tells you what the rest of the engagement will be like.
Then why work with you instead of a firm with an office here?
Because the office is not what you're buying. You're buying who is on the call and who is still there in year two. At a national firm the senior person sells the work and a delivery team builds it, and almost nobody stays past go-live, which is precisely when the interesting failures start. Here the same engineer does the assessment, the build, and the operating, and there is nobody to hand you off to.
What size company do you work with?
Roughly 50 to 500 employees. Manufacturing, distribution and logistics, insurance and financial services, non-clinical healthcare administration, energy, and professional firms. Below about twenty employees the economics don't work at these prices, and I'll tell you that rather than take the engagement.
How much does it cost?
The AI assessment is $2,500, fixed scope, two-week turnaround, with a written report that's yours regardless of what happens next. Systems builds start at $18,000 fixed price, quoted after the assessment. Operations retainers start at $3,500/month for a single system, rising with what's under management, month to month. Full detail on the engagements page.
Why isn't there a free consultation?
Because a free consultation is a sales call, and it produces a proposal shaped like whatever the consultant already wanted to sell. A real assessment means interviewing the people who do the work, mapping undocumented systems, and quantifying opportunities against your actual volumes, which is a week of engineering effort. Charging for it means the findings are yours regardless, including the finding that you shouldn't build anything yet.
Can you come on site if we need it?
On-site time is not part of the standard engagement and I don't want to sell it as one. If a specific session genuinely needs a room, a walk of the floor or a workshop with people who will never join a video call, we scope that into the statement of work before it happens. What I won't do is quote you a retainer that's partly a travel budget.
Find out what AI is actually worth in your Dallas / Fort Worth operation.
A fixed-scope assessment, delivered in two weeks, with a written report you keep. You'll know what's worth building, what it costs, and what it returns. You'll also know which items aren't worth doing at all.
Start an Assessment ↗Prefer plain email? byron@walkeraisystems.com