one moment
Services
Three engagement shapes. One practice.
Most clients enter through Strategy or Build, then add an Embed retainer once there's something worth sustaining. Every engagement is scoped before we start — no time-and-materials, no surprise change orders.
Shipped in
- Hospitality
- Claims
- Fintech ops
- E-commerce
- Healthcare admin
- Insurance ops
- Payments
- Infrastructure
Methodology
The HB Method.
Every engagement — Strategy, Build, or Embed — runs in the same three movements. Different scopes, different durations, same shape: Listen, then build, then sustain.
Listen.
Two weeks of structured interviews with the people doing the work. We read the existing systems carefully enough that we could maintain them — instrumentation, not opinions.
Build.
We ship the smallest piece of the system that proves the rest of the plan. A prototype against real data, a working integration, a deployable agent — not a deck.
Sustain.
We stay in the room while your team takes ownership. Embed retainers, eval harnesses, on-call rotation — whatever it takes for the work to keep working without us.
01
Strategy
Roadmaps that survive the first vendor pitch.
Most AI strategy work in the wild is theatre — a landscape deck, a maturity quadrant, a five-year vision that nobody on the team can defend to a board member without sweating. We don't do that.
A Strategy engagement starts with sitting with your team. We listen to where the work actually breaks, instrument what we can, and read the existing systems carefully enough that we could maintain them. By the end you have a sequenced plan — what to build, what to buy, what to kill, what to wait on — that someone in your org could explain in plain English to a customer.
Engagement shapes
Strategy sprint
One week, on-site
Fixed-scope. Two of us, four days of interviews and analysis, day five is the readout. Best for teams that already know there's something to do, just not what.
Readiness audit
Six weeks
Deeper. We instrument the work, model the economics, and produce a sequenced 12-month plan with budget bands and named risks. Best for orgs about to commit real capital.
Quarterly roadmap retainer
Rolling
We come back every quarter for a re-plan as the model frontier moves and your business does. Best paired with an Embed retainer.
Questions we typically tackle
- Where does AI actually shorten our time-to-revenue, and where is it just expensive automation?
- Should we build, buy, or partner — and what's the cost of being wrong about each?
- Which workflows are safe to automate now, and which need a human in the loop for the next 24 months?
- What does our org chart look like a year after this works?
When this isn’t right
You already know what to build and just need it built. Skip to a Build engagement.
02
Build
Custom software that uses AI well, on a stack you already trust.
Build engagements ship software. We're principal engineers first and AI specialists second — that order matters, because most AI code in production fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the models. It fails because the surrounding system doesn't handle retries, doesn't have proper observability, doesn't separate the deterministic boring parts from the stochastic interesting parts.
We build the boring pieces the way a craftsperson would, integrate the AI carefully where it earns its place, and document it so your team can extend what we shipped. We work on your stack: TypeScript, Python, Go, Rust, whatever you've already invested in. We don't show up with a framework preference.
Engagement shapes
Bespoke agent or workflow
4–10 weeks
A custom agent or automation against a specific business outcome — claims triage, customer-service deflection, internal research assistant, code-modification bot.
RAG over your knowledge
3–6 weeks
Retrieval system grounded in your real corpus — support history, contracts, runbooks, design docs. Deployed as an API your apps can hit.
Integrations across your tools
2–8 weeks
Connect what your team uses (CRM, helpdesk, billing, project tooling) with AI-mediated workflows that handle the boring stuff and escalate the interesting stuff.
Questions we typically tackle
- What's the smallest piece of this workflow we can ship to production this month, with confidence?
- Where do we put the human in the loop, and how do we make that loop fast enough?
- How do we evaluate this in a way that catches regressions before customers do?
- What's the cost of every interaction, and how does that scale as we grow?
When this isn’t right
You haven't decided what to build yet — start with Strategy. Or you need a generic SaaS product, not custom software.
03
Embed
Fractional Chief AI Officer. We sit inside your team.
Embed is for the part of the journey that needs sustained judgment from someone senior, week after week — not a deliverable, a presence. We join your leadership cadence, run the AI council if you have one, sit in vendor calls, take the late-night Slack messages when something breaks.
Two days a week is typical. We're scoped by quarter, renewable, with a clean exit clause either side. The arrangement works when there's an internal owner we're sparring with; it doesn't when we're being asked to replace one.
Engagement shapes
Fractional CAIO retainer
Per quarter, renewable
Two days a week embedded with your team. Leadership presence, architectural calls, vendor selection, hiring, the works.
AI council chair
Monthly cadence
We chair your internal AI council. Lighter touch — once-a-month working sessions, async between. For orgs that already have an internal AI lead.
Executive sparring partner
Weekly, 90 min
Just a standing slot in your week with a senior outsider who can read the room and call the BS. The lightest version of an Embed engagement.
Questions we typically tackle
- Who's the AI accountable executive in our org, and what do they actually need from us?
- How do we resist the pull of every shiny vendor demo without becoming the 'no' department?
- What hires do we make in what order, and what are we hiring against?
- When does this stop being a fractional engagement and become a full-time hire?
When this isn’t right
You don't have an internal owner for this work yet. Hire one first; we'll help you write the JD.
Start here
Tell uswhat you’re trying to do.
The first conversation is free, takes about thirty minutes, and goes wherever it needs to. If we’re not the right fit, we’ll say so and point you somewhere that is.
Hambone
HB Services AI assistant
Hi — I’m Hambone.
Ask me about the practice, what AI could do for your business, or how engagements work. I keep answers short.