AI strategy & advisory — Chicago only
We help operators separate the signal from the noise on AI — what's real, what's mounting hype, and the small number of moves that would actually move your business.
One practice. Two ways to work with us. No industry restrictions — only a geographic one.
Chicago, and only Chicago. We work in person across the Chicago metro area — any industry, any size business, one geography. That's the trade we've made: less travel, more context, and pricing that reflects a local practice rather than a national firm.
How we think
Most "AI strategy" is either sales pitch or science project. Ours is built on four fields that were solving hard problems long before language models existed.
Businesses behave like systems, not org charts.
Revenue, churn, and morale rarely move in straight lines. We look for feedback loops, bottlenecks, and the handful of leverage points where a small change produces a disproportionate result — and we're equally interested in finding the fragile parts of the system that a well-meaning AI initiative could break.
Build for the failure mode, not the demo.
A model that's right 95% of the time is a liability if nobody's designed for the other 5%. We apply the same discipline engineers use for any critical system: tolerances, redundancy, graceful degradation, and a clear-eyed view of what happens when the thing is wrong.
We know what's actually happening under the product.
Latency, cost-per-inference, context limits, data gravity, what runs on a GPU versus what doesn't need to. Strategy divorced from these constraints is just enthusiasm. We keep the conversation tied to what the hardware and the stack will actually let you do, this year and next.
Adoption is a people problem before it's a tooling problem.
The best model in the world is worthless if your team routes around it. We design for how people actually make decisions — incentives, trust, loss aversion, the political reality of who loses status when a process changes — not how they'd behave in a spreadsheet.
How we work together
We deliberately sell two things. A focused engagement to get you unstuck, and an ongoing seat at the table for the businesses that need us close by.
Most requested
$9,500 per engagement
Two days, spaced apart, with real analysis in between — not a single off-site that ends in a slide deck nobody opens again.
Select slots — 4 at a time
$6,500 per month
For businesses mid-transition — a product build, an industry shock, a stack decision that won't wait for a quarterly review.
No deck. No RFP. Just tell us what's actually going on and we'll tell you honestly whether a workshop is enough, or whether this is an advisory conversation.
Email studio@complexityconsulting.co