AI for a business that does not have a data team.

What it looks like

What AI can actually do for a business like yours.

Five things that are genuinely within reach for a small operation today. Each one is a specific job, not a platform.

• Ask your own data a question in plain English

  Which products moved slowest last quarter? Which customers have not ordered since spring? Today that means exporting to a spreadsheet and building a pivot table, or asking whoever is best with Excel. Instead you type the question and get the answer, straight from the system that already holds your sales or operations data. The technique is called NL2SQL, and it is one of the more reliable things generative AI does.

• An assistant that knows how your business actually works

  Your SOPs, price sheets, warranty terms, and past quotes are probably spread across folders, PDFs, and email. An assistant grounded in those documents answers from them, so a new hire can ask what the lead time is on a part and get your answer rather than a plausible guess. This is retrieval-augmented generation, and it is the difference between an AI that knows your business and one that knows the internet.

• Automate the reply you write over and over

  A quote request arrives. Someone reads it, checks stock, checks a delivery date, and writes back. An AI agent can do the reading and the checking, then draft the reply for a person to approve and send. Anything that has to be exact, like the price or the availability, stays in ordinary code where it can be audited. The judgment call is what the AI handles.

• A forecast when you need one, with nothing left running

  How much should I order? How many people do I need on the floor next month? You get a validated forecast built from your own history, delivered when you ask for it. There is no dashboard to maintain and no system left running afterward, which matters when nobody on staff is going to babysit it.

• Your own team, set up to build the next one

  If someone on your team is technical and curious, I can set them up to build with AI coding assistants the same way I do. That is the version of this engagement where you stop needing me, which is a reasonable thing to want.

The engagement

The Small-Shop Starter.

Bigger or less defined work runs at $250 per hour, with fixed-bid pricing once the scope is clear. Full rates are on the engagements section of the main page.

Questions

What owners usually ask first.

• Can a small business without a data team actually use AI?

  Yes, if you have data and a specific job to do. The thing that has changed is cost: work that used to require a data team and a quarter of engineering time now takes weeks, because AI-assisted development compresses the build. What has not changed is that AI applied to a vague goal wastes money. The businesses that get value from this start with one concrete, repetitive task, not with a strategy.

• What does AI for a small business cost?

  My Small-Shop Starter is $5,000 fixed for one scoped build: we agree the use case and the price in writing before any work starts, and you get it running on your own data with a handover session so your team can operate it. Larger or less defined work runs at $250 per hour, with fixed-bid pricing available once the scope is clear. There is no hourly meter running on the Starter and no retainer to sign.

• How long does it take?

  Weeks, not quarters. A scoped Small-Shop Starter is typically a few weeks from the first call to something running on your data. I build with AI coding assistants, which is a large part of why that timeline is realistic rather than optimistic.

• What do I need to have before we start?

  Data that already exists somewhere retrievable, and one job you want done. That can be a point-of-sale export, a folder of PDFs, an inbox, a QuickBooks file, or a spreadsheet somebody maintains by hand. You do not need a data warehouse, a cloud contract, or a clean schema. If your data turns out to be too thin to support what you want, I will tell you that during scoping rather than after you have paid for a build.

• What if an off-the-shelf tool already does this?

  Then I will tell you that and point you at it. A meaningful share of small-business AI requests are better served by a product that already exists for a monthly fee than by anything custom. Finding that out in a scoping call costs you nothing and saves you five thousand dollars, and I would rather be the person who told you than the person who billed you.

• Do I need to be in Austin to work with you?

  No. Delivery is remote, and most of this work does not require anyone in the room. I am based in Cedar Park in the Austin metro and spend part of the year in the Knoxville area, so on-site time is easy in either region and available elsewhere when a project genuinely calls for it.

• Who am I actually working with?

  Me, directly. I am a Ph.D. physicist who spent eight years inside Oracle's AI Center of Excellence delivering AI systems for enterprise clients in manufacturing, oil and gas, public sector, and retail, plus four years before that building machine learning systems on large data platforms. There is no bench of junior consultants behind me and nobody your project gets handed down to.