Get the AI system into production.
Three engagement tiers, one principle: nothing counts until it's running in your business and your team can maintain it.
Fit
Who this is for.
Good fit
- You have an AI project that's stalled between prototype and production
- Your operation is genuinely complex regulated, multi-stakeholder, or built on decades of accumulated process
- You need someone who can design the system and build it, not one or the other
- Leadership is behind it. The best engagements are somebody's top-two priority, not a side experiment
- You want your team to own the result, not to remain dependent on Skowak afterward
Not a fit
- You need a large delivery team or 24/7 coverage hire a firm
- You want a strategy deck with no implementation
- You're shopping primarily on hourly rate
Tier one · Map
AI Opportunity Sprint
2–3 weeks · fixed fee · starts at $12,000
Most AI projects fail at scoping, not at engineering. They pick a use case that sounds impressive, discover halfway through that the data isn't there or the workflow can't absorb it, and quietly die.
The Sprint front-loads that risk. In two to three weeks we go through your operation, find where AI can actually create value, and pressure-test it against reality your data, your constraints, your people. We use Evaluation-Driven Design to force the specific questions that determine whether a project succeeds or fails before the first line of code is written.
What you get
- A prioritized opportunity heatmap: what to build, in what order, and why
- Feasibility assessment per candidate project, with the ones you should not build called out and explained
- An evaluation framework blueprint the measurable criteria that would prove each opportunity works
- Stakeholder alignment summary capturing where the organization agrees and where it doesn't
- Honest scope, sequence, and cost estimates
The deliverable is yours whether or not we work together after. If you take the plan and build it with your own team, that's a good outcome. If the Sprint says your project shouldn't be built, that's the cheapest useful answer you'll get this year.
Tier two · Build
Agentic Workflow Redesign
4–6 weeks · fixed scope · starts at $35,000
Your AI pilot works in a demo. Now someone has to figure out how it fits into the actual workflow who reviews what the agent produces, what happens when it's wrong, how you know it's working, and who's accountable.
That's not an engineering problem. It's a design problem. And it's the one that determines whether your AI investment produces returns or produces a stalled proof-of-concept.
What you get
- Current-state and future-state workflow maps where human judgment is genuinely required vs. where it's merely habitual
- Agentic workflow blueprints with AI agent placement, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and escalation paths
- An evaluation framework for every AI-assisted decision point measurable criteria, not a test plan
- RACI matrix and traceability diagrams for governance and audit
- A pilot action plan that bridges directly to implementation
This is the work every Skowak case study already describes separating human judgment from deterministic process, redesigning workflows around that distinction, and instrumenting the result. Now it has a name.
Tier three · Build + Prove
Embedded Build & Prove Retainer
Monthly · minimum 3 months · starts at $35,000/month
Skowak works inside your team. The system gets designed, built, instrumented, and proved and Skowak stays until it's in production, your people can maintain it, and there's a plan for what happens next.
This is not advisory. Skowak writes code, reviews your team's code, and owns delivery of the thing. The retainer includes building, evaluating, iterating, and the "Prove" deliverables: performance dashboards, retrospective reviews, and a scale-up roadmap.
What you get
- A production AI system, built end to end
- Evaluation harnesses the continuous instrument panel, not a one-time test
- Performance dashboard tracking accuracy, reliability, adoption, and business impact
- Interface and workflow design because a system nobody uses isn't in production
- Monthly retrospectives: what shipped, what the evals show, what needs to change
- Scale-up roadmap and ownership transfer in the final month
Month-to-month after the initial three months. If the evaluation dashboard shows the work isn't producing results, you stop. No lock-in beyond the minimum needed to build something real.
How we work
Map. Build. Prove.
Map
Find the work worth doing. We go through your operation with the people who actually do it not just leadership. The output is a ranked set of candidates with the disqualified ones explained. Ruling projects out is most of the value here; every one killed early saves a quarter.
Build
Build it inside your reality. Your stack, your data, your constraints. We build end to end retrieval, orchestration, business logic, interface with your engineers involved throughout so knowledge accumulates on your side, not ours.
Prove
Instrument before you trust. Evaluations aren't a QA gate at the end; they're the instrument panel you develop against from the first prototype. Defined dimension by dimension, so when something regresses you know exactly what and where.
Evaluation-Driven Design
Defining "good" is the actual consulting work.
Here's the part most teams miss. You can't write an evaluation for "is this response relevant?" until you've decided what relevant means for this document type, this user, this edge case, this regulatory constraint.
Which means building evaluations forces the conversation nobody has had yet. What counts as correct for a billing dispute versus an outage? How complete does an answer need to be before a nurse can act on it? Which failures are annoying and which are catastrophic?
That's requirements elicitation wearing an engineering name. It's the same work as good product design, and it produces two things at once: a system you can measure, and a specification you didn't have.
Evaluations aren't a pass/fail gate. They're an instrument panel.
It's also why Skowak doesn�t separate the design work from the engineering work. The person defining what "good" means should be the person building the thing that has to achieve it. We call this Evaluation-Driven Design it threads through every tier, from the Sprint's eval decomposition to the Retainer's continuous evaluation framework.
Deliverables
Artifacts, not impressions.
- Working software in your repository, under your control
- Evaluation suites and ground-truth datasets you own
- Architecture and decision documentation what was built, and why it was built that way
- Interface designs and workflow models
- Recorded walkthroughs for the team who inherits it
- A written record of what was ruled out and why
Questions
FAQ
- What's the difference between the Sprint, the Workflow Redesign, and the Retainer?
- The Sprint tells you what to build. The Workflow Redesign designs how it works — who reviews what, where AI agents make decisions, how you know it's performing. The Retainer builds it, proves it works in production, and transfers ownership to your team. You can enter at any tier depending on where you are.
- How is this different from hiring a firm?
- A firm gives you capacity and a brand; Skowak gives you a senior practitioner who does every part of the job personally. If you need six engineers, hire a firm. If you need one person with twenty years of judgment who will write the code, that's this.
- What is Evaluation-Driven Design?
- Building evaluations forces the conversation nobody has had yet — what "good" means for this document type, this user, this edge case. That's requirements elicitation wearing an engineering name. It threads through every engagement: the Sprint's eval decomposition, the Redesign's decision-point criteria, the Retainer's continuous evaluation framework.
- Do you only build with Claude / GPT / open models?
- Model choice is an engineering decision, made per project, and it changes every few months. Skowak recommends what fits your constraints — including running open models in your own environment when compliance requires it.
- What if the Sprint says my project shouldn't be built?
- Then it's the cheapest useful answer you'll get this year. That outcome is a success — better to hear it in week two than month seven.
- Can you work with our existing engineering team?
- Yes, and it's preferred. The Retainer is designed around your team owning the result — the goal is to make Skowak unnecessary as quickly as possible.
- Do you sign NDAs and work in regulated environments?
- Yes. Skowak has built for insurance underwriting, federal healthcare data, and energy operations, and is familiar with what changes when "move fast and break things" isn't available.
Start here
What are you trying to build?
If you're evaluating where AI fits in your operation or you have a project stalled between demo and production, that's the conversation Skowak is built for.