Engagements

Fixed price. Scoped in writing.

Three engagement types, in the order they happen. A paid assessment that produces a written diagnosis. A fixed-price build against a written scope. A retainer that keeps the system working a year later, when the models it was built on no longer exist. No hourly billing and no change-order theater. The first call is free and takes about 20 minutes, and that is where you get the numbers.

Paid assessment first · Fixed-price builds · You own everything

Phases 01 to 03 · Start here

AI Assessment

For the company that has been told AI will help and wants an engineer's diagnosis of where, how much, and whether it's worth doing at all.

Fixed scope and price

two-week turnaround · report is yours to keep

  • Interviews with the people who do the work, not just the executive who signed off on it
  • Process and systems mapping across the target functions, including the tools nobody documented
  • Opportunities quantified in hours and dollars, with every assumption shown so you can argue with it
  • AI Readiness scored 1 to 5, where 5 means automation that independently verifies its own work
  • A prioritized roadmap with honest build estimates, including what isn't worth building
  • Delivered as a written report and a working session with your team
  • Your team's footprint is three touchpoints: a kickoff call, one short interview per person, and a single working session at the end. Read-only access or a guided walkthrough is enough; I don't need production credentials
Start an Assessment ↗

Phase 04 · Build

Systems Build

For the roadmap items that earned their place. Your first build is the smallest one on the roadmap, and it has to prove its value in your numbers before anything bigger gets approved.

Quoted after the assessment

fixed price · you see the number in writing before you commit to anything · a first build is weeks of work, not quarters, and the delivery date is written into the quote

  • Agent systems, operational automation, or custom software: whatever the diagnosis called for
  • Integration into your real systems: ERP, CRM, ticketing, document stores, and the internal tool from 2011
  • Its own checks and alerts are built in. Operate is a person answering them, not the missing half of the build
  • An evaluation suite so a future model swap is a measured decision, not a leap of faith. How I keep that current
  • Built in your accounts, in your name, with full documentation and team handoff
  • Fixed price against a written scope, by a named date. The number doesn't move after you say yes
  • Six acceptance criteria agreed before work starts, tested together at the end and signed, "done" is a test, not an opinion
Talk about a build ↗

Phase 05 · Operate

Operate & Maintain

For companies that would rather not discover in month nine that the system has been quietly wrong since the last model update.

Monthly for one system

rises with what's under management · month to month · cancel any time with 30 days' notice

  • 24/7 automated monitoring and alerting, so detection never depends on a human being awake
  • Human incident acknowledgment SLA: within 1 hour, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Central; within 4 hours overnight
  • Bounded auto-remediation where safe; human follow-up on everything else
  • Model migration against a regression suite as better, cheaper, or safer models ship
  • Incident response by the engineer who built it, not a ticket queue
  • Drift detection on model output, upstream schemas, and prompt performance
  • A monthly accuracy report of what ran, what escalated, and what it got wrong
  • Cancel any time with 30 days' written notice and keep everything. The retainer gets re-earned every month

Operate & Maintain is capped at eight clients. Nobody pays for attention I can't give.

Talk about operations ↗

Small business · A different door

Automation Sprint

For the roofer, the HVAC shop, the field-service crew, or one department in a plant: one paperwork job, at a size where a full build makes no sense.

Fixed one week

one week · one workflow · you keep what I build

  • One job your office still does by hand, such as quoting, invoicing, chasing paperwork after the crews roll out, or sorting the inbox
  • The smallest thing that removes it, built and shown working on your real data
  • A check you can run yourself, so you never have to take the system's word for it
  • Plain-language handoff. If it needs a login and a runbook, you get both
  • If a week of my time will not pay for itself in your operation, I say so before you sign
Start a sprint ↗

Local · In person · East Texas

AI Workshops

For the business owner, the office manager, or anyone within ninety minutes of Lindale who wants to use AI properly and has not found anyone local to show them.

Per seat or per team

open session · two and a half hours · Saturday morning in Tyler · bring a laptop

  • Team workshop on site, a half day or a full day. Your people, your tools, your work on the screen
  • You leave with AI set up and working on your own tasks, not a slide deck about the future
  • The rules that keep you out of trouble, what never goes into a chatbot and how to check an answer before you act on it
  • No product to sell you. I use the tools you already pay for, or the free ones
  • Anywhere within ninety minutes of Lindale: Tyler, Longview, Kilgore, Athens, Canton, Mineola, Jacksonville, Palestine

Next open session: the date is posted here as soon as the room is booked. Email to hold a seat or to book your team, and I reply with the details and a payment link. Nothing to buy on this page.

Hold a seat ↗

The Guarantee

Nothing I build fails silently.

Production AI systems rarely break loudly. They degrade a little at a time. A model update shifts behavior, an upstream schema changes, extraction accuracy slides from 98% to 91%, and nothing throws an exception. You find out from a customer, or from a number that has been wrong for a quarter before anyone checked it. Every system I build reports on itself independently and tells you when it's wrong. If one fails without telling you, that's a defect in my work and I fix that gap at no charge: both the failure and the reason it went unreported. That guarantee is the reason this business exists.

Two limits, stated here rather than buried. It runs for thirty days after acceptance under the build's warranty, and after that for as long as I'm actively monitoring the system. I can't promise to catch a silence nobody is listening for. And it covers the telling, not the acting. Everything the system does tell you still needs an operator to act on it: the drift it flags, the schema change it catches, the degradation it pages about. That's the retainer's job, and it's a different job.

How a fixed-price build ends

"Done" is a test you sign, not an opinion.

The risk in a fixed price is that nobody wrote down what finished means, so completion gets negotiated at the end, when everyone is tired and one side holds the advantage.

Every build SOW defines six acceptance criteria before any work starts. At the end we sit down together and execute them. The measured result against each one is written onto an Acceptance Certificate that we both sign.

Two of those are worth reading twice. One requires the verification layer to catch a failure I deliberately inject during the session, so the system proves it detects its own breakage while you watch, rather than my telling you it does. The other requires every piece of infrastructure to run in accounts you own, on your credentials, checked at handover instead of promised in a sales call.

Signing releases the final invoice and starts the warranty clock. If a criterion isn't met, it isn't done, and it isn't billed. That protects you from paying for unfinished work, and it protects me from a project that can never be declared finished. Fixed price only means something when both are true.

Acceptance Certificate signed at the session
  1. 1 Performs the function on your real records, at the volume and accuracy fixed in the SOW
  2. 2 Verification layer detects a deliberately injected failure, in the session
  3. 3 Alerts reach the named person, confirmed received
  4. 4 All infrastructure in accounts you own, on your credentials
  5. 5 Architecture, runbook, change guide, and third-party license list delivered
  6. 6 Handoff session completed

The blank form, as it stands before an acceptance session. Any open item gets written on it rather than left unsaid. Signing releases the final 50% invoice and starts the 30-day warranty, and does not end the guarantee, which runs for as long as the system is monitored.

What Operations Actually Means

The report nobody else will send you.

Every vendor will tell you their system is working. Very few will show you the cases where it wasn't.

A document pipeline that mishandles one invoice in twenty is worse than no pipeline at all, because the errors are now invisible and arriving at scale. Your vendor doesn't know it's happening either. Nobody is independently checking.

Every month, you get a report like this on whatever I've built: extraction accuracy sampled against source documents, agent actions verified against real system state, drift measured rather than assumed. Real numbers on what ran, what escalated to a human, and the cases it got wrong, with the receipts, so you can decide what to do about it.

I built an incident platform whose agents grade their own work against live metrics specifically so they can't lie about whether a fix held. This is that architecture, pointed at your operation. What happens without that check is on the public record: twenty-six verified failures, each with the missing control named.

Read the case study →
Monthly Accuracy Report Example

· illustrative figures, not a client result

4,812 Documents processed
97.8% Verified correct
34 Flagged for your review
Auto-approved
4,431 within threshold
Routed to human
347, low confidence
Audit sample
240 checked vs. source
Extraction miss
Schema change
Output drift
Downtime
0 minutes

The 34 flagged items are the point of this report. An agent that reports its own success is not a monitored system. Verification runs independently, against source of truth.

The Math

What the manual process actually costs.

The assessment runs this with your real numbers. Here's the shape of it for one back-office function at a company of about 150 people, the kind of process that's invisible until someone counts it.

  1. 01

    People on the process

    2.5 FTE

    Intake, keying, reconciliation, exception chasing, and status calls across two or three systems that don't talk.

  2. 02

    Fully loaded cost

    $68k / yr

    Salary, benefits, and overhead per head. Use your real loaded rate, because most companies underestimate this by a third.

  3. 03

    Realistic reduction

    50 to 65%

    Not elimination. Exceptions still need judgment. The goal is that people handle only the exceptions.

  4. 04

    Annual recovery

    $85k to $110k

    Against a one-time build plus retainer. Payback typically lands inside the first year, and that's before error and rework costs.

These are illustrative figures, not a forecast for your business. The assessment replaces every one of them with numbers pulled from your actual operation, meaning volumes, cycle times, error rates and loaded costs, and shows the arithmetic so your CFO can take it apart. If the math doesn't clear the bar, that goes in the report too.

Scope

Who this is for, and who it isn't.

Being specific about this saves us both a call.

A good fit

  • Mid-market: roughly 50 to 500 employees, real operational complexity, and no internal team to spare for this
  • Small business: a crew and an office drowning in the same paperwork. The Automation Sprint above is your door
  • Energy services and industrial manufacturing and distribution first; the trades, non-clinical healthcare administration and other document-heavy operations welcome
  • A specific process that's expensive, high-volume, and currently done by people doing the same thing repeatedly
  • A pilot that worked in a demo and stalled before production, usually on integration or verification
  • An existing AI system nobody can confirm is still working correctly
  • Regulated environments where auditability and confidentiality are engineering constraints, not afterthoughts

Not a fit

  • Under about 20 employees and shopping the full build ladder. The sprint is your door; a full build usually is not, and I would tell you that rather than take your money
  • Looking for a low-cost monthly tool you configure yourself; several are good and I'll name them
  • Wanting a strategy deck with no intention of building anything
  • Needing a team of ten on site next month. I'm one senior engineer, and the practice is built around that
  • Hoping to replace headcount outright rather than move people onto the exceptions
  • Unwilling to give a consultant access to real systems and real staff. The diagnosis requires both
  • Anything touching protected health information. I don't handle PHI or sign HIPAA BAAs, and that's a deliberate limit, not an oversight

Straight Answers

The questions you're already thinking.

Do you teach people how to use AI, or only build systems?

Both. The workshops exist because most people in East Texas have been handed AI tools with no one local to show them how to use them properly. An open session is two and a half hours on a Saturday morning in Tyler, bring a laptop, and you leave with AI set up and working on your own tasks.

A team workshop is a half or full day on site, within ninety minutes of Lindale, on your tools and your work. Neither one is a sales pitch for a build. If a workshop is all your business needs, that is the recommendation.

Is the first conversation free?

Yes. The first call takes about 20 minutes and costs nothing. It covers what the job is, who does it today, and whether I am the right person for it, and if I am not, you hear that on the call.

A real assessment means interviewing the people who do the work, mapping systems that were never documented, and quantifying opportunities against your actual volumes. That's a week of engineering effort, and it is the paid part. Charging for it means the findings belong to you regardless of what happens next, including the finding that you shouldn't build anything yet. A diagnosis given away free tends to end in a proposal shaped like whatever the consultant already wanted to sell. For what other firms publish, checked at the source and set beside these numbers, see what AI consulting costs in 2026.

Does the assessment fee credit toward a build?

No, and that's deliberate. Crediting it would turn the assessment back into a sales call, because I'd have a financial stake in recommending a build.

The assessment is a standalone deliverable with standalone value. If the recommendation is to fix a process rather than automate it, or to wait six months, I still did the work and you still have a report you can act on without me.

Why does a build cost what it does?

Because the model is the easy part. The majority of the work in a production AI system is integration into systems that weren't designed to be integrated with, plus the verification and monitoring layers that tell you whether it's still working.

Those layers are what gets cut to hit a lower number, and cutting them is the single most common reason AI pilots never reach production, or reach it and degrade unnoticed. A single small job fits the one-week sprint instead.

Do I have to commit to the whole roadmap to start?

No. The assessment gives you a ranked list of separately scoped, separately priced projects. You buy the smallest one, and it has to prove its value in your numbers before we talk about the next. I re-earn each phase. That's the deal.

What you're never asked to buy is a fraction of something bigger. Each build is a complete, running system: integrated, verified, monitored, and yours. So if you stop after the first one, you still own a system that pays for itself. Your exposure at any moment is one small build, not the whole vision.

Am I locked into the retainer?

No. It's month to month. Cancel with 30 days' written notice and you keep the system, the accounts, the documentation, and the evaluation suite.

The retainer has to be re-earned every month. If I have to trap you in a contract to keep you, I've already failed at the part I'm claiming to be good at.

Who owns what you build?

You do. Accounts are created in your name during onboarding, credentials are yours, and every build ships with documentation and a handoff session for your team.

No proprietary runtime, no black-box middleware, no hostage situations. If you want to take it in-house or hand it to another firm, you can, and I'll help with the transition.

You're one person. What happens if you get hit by a bus?

Fair question. It is a risk you should price in, and the design reduces it. Everything runs in your accounts, not mine. Documentation ships at delivery, not on request. There's no proprietary layer that only I can maintain, and no credential only I hold.

A system I built can be picked up by any competent engineer, which is a deliberate design constraint. What you'd lose is the operator, not the system.

How do you handle security and confidentiality?

As engineering requirements, from the design stage. Prompt injection defense, credential handling, tenant isolation, least-privilege access, and audit logging are scoped into the build rather than added before launch.

For regulated environments, I design to the compliance constraints that apply to you and document the controls so they survive a review. I'll sign your NDA and work inside your access policies rather than asking for exceptions.

What about third-party costs like model usage, infrastructure and licenses?

Billed to your accounts, in your name, visible to you in full. My pricing covers my work, which is the diagnosis, the build, the operations, and the reporting.

I'll estimate the run-rate before you commit, and I'd rather you see those invoices directly than have me mark them up. Part of what the retainer buys is moving you onto cheaper models when cheaper models are good enough.

What's your capacity, and how soon could you start?

One assessment at a time. Two weeks is my attention, not my calendar, and running two at once would make both worse. Operate is capped at eight systems under management for the same reason.

The two-week clock starts from the latest of three things: countersignature, payment, and the access described in the scope being in place. It does not start from our first conversation, and the most common reason an assessment runs late is the third one.

I'm not going to publish a lead time here, because it would be stale the week after I wrote it and a stale number is worse than none. Ask me and you'll get a real date. If I can't start when you need me to, I'll tell you that instead of holding the slot.

Do you work outside East Texas?

Yes. I'm based in Lindale and work regularly in Tyler, Longview, and Dallas, and I like being able to sit in the room during discovery. But the work is remote-first and the build is identical anywhere.

For engagements outside driving distance, the assessment interviews happen by video and I'll travel on site if the scope warrants it.

Bring your real numbers.
The report will show the arithmetic.

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 ↗
  • Fixed scope
  • Two-week turnaround
  • Written report, yours to keep

Prefer plain email? byron@walkeraisystems.com

Fixed scope Start an Assessment ↗