The audit comes first. Always.
Most AI projects fail because somebody bought a tool before anyone worked out what it was supposed to fix. So we start by mapping your business and telling you where AI pays — and where it does not. That map is free, it takes about thirty minutes of your time, and it is yours whether or not you hire us.
Four stages, in this order.
The order matters more than the speed. Building before identifying is how a business ends up owning AI it does not use, and it is the single most common way this goes wrong.
Nothing here is billed until the plan is written and you have agreed to it.
Identify
A conversation about how your business actually runs, then a look at where work piles up, gets repeated, or quietly falls through. We put a number on each one so the list is ordered by money rather than by enthusiasm.
Design
Built around your existing workflows and software, with an explicit decision about what stays with your people. Costs, timeline and expected return in writing before anything is built.
Implement
We build, connect and test against your real services, hours, calendars and documents rather than a sample set, then launch. Your team learns it in hours, and we document what a human still owns.
Improve
Measured against the numbers in the plan and tuned as your business changes — configuration, not a rebuild.
What we need from you
- What you know about your business — services, pricing rules, hours, the questions customers always ask, and how you want unusual ones handled. Usually one conversation plus a short questionnaire.
- Calendar access — if we are booking appointments, we need your Google Calendar shared with our service account so availability is real rather than guessed.
- A decision about your phone number — keep your existing number and forward it, or let us provision a new tracked line. Porting is available if you would rather move it outright.
- Someone who can say yes — one person on your side who can approve how the system should behave. Not a committee, and not a technical role.
- Optionally, a voice sample — one to three minutes of natural speech, if you would rather the AI answer in your own voice than in one of ours. A phone memo is fine. Cloning it is a few minutes of onboarding.
The voice sample is the only optional item. Skip it and we choose from our range of professional voices instead — and a cloned voice can be swapped in later without rebuilding anything.
What we won't promise
AI should not run your whole operation. Judgment calls, upset customers, clinical and legal decisions — anything where being wrong is expensive — stay with your people. We design the handoff rather than paper over it.
We will not quote a timeline for work we have not scoped. Anchor is usually live a day or two after intake, because it configures a system already running. Anything larger gets a written estimate before you commit.
And we will not sell you what the audit says you do not need. If your bottleneck is a hiring or process problem rather than a technology one, the audit says so.
Common questions
What does the free AI audit actually involve?
A conversation about how your business runs, a look at where work piles up, and a written map of where AI would and would not pay for itself. It takes about thirty minutes of your time. There is no cost and no obligation, and the map is yours whether or not you hire us.
Do we have to start with the AI receptionist?
No. Anchor is where many engagements start because the phone is usually the most expensive leak and the fastest thing to fix, but the audit decides. If your bottleneck is quoting, paperwork, or follow-up, we start there instead.
How long until something is live?
For an Anchor deployment, most businesses are live within a day or two of the intake call. Broader implementation work is scoped in the audit and carries its own timeline, which we give you in writing before you commit to anything.
Do we need to be technical?
No. We handle setup, configuration, integration, and testing. Your side is knowledge about your business, not code.
What happens when the AI does not know an answer?
It says so, then transfers to your line during business hours or takes a detailed message and texts it to you. It does not invent an answer, and nothing gets dropped silently.
Start with the audit
Thirty free minutes: what the gaps cost you, and a straight answer on what is worth building — including when that answer is nothing yet.