Ways to work together
Five ways in, depending on how sure you are
Most people find us somewhere between curious and burned. So there’s more than one door, and the small ones are designed to be walked through without commitment.
Two things hold across all of them. Nothing is billed by the hour. And every engagement is scoped and priced after we’ve looked at your business, in a written proposal that says what’s included and, just as clearly, what isn’t.
Before a number would mean anything
There’s a version of this you’ve seen online. Somebody builds an AI agent over a weekend and posts the demo, and the demo works. It works on exactly the thing it was built to demo.
What a weekend skips is everything that makes it survive contact with your business. Your exceptions. Your pricing rules. The four situations where the honest answer is that it depends. The client who asks something nobody anticipated. That’s why most of those builds get quietly switched off a month or two after they go live, and why the business ends up back where it started with less patience than before.
So there’s no price list here, and it isn’t coyness. A number with no scope attached gets measured against the weekend version, and that comparison helps nobody, including you. What an engagement costs moves with how much information there is and what state it’s in, how many functions you’re starting with, and how much volume runs through them. Every figure lands in a written proposal after we’ve actually looked at your business.
“I’m not sure AI is even right for us”
The AI Reality Check
A paid working session with Fiorella, an hour or more, where we go through the business properly. Where it actually is right now. What’s holding it back. Whether AI would help, and specifically where it would and wouldn’t.
You get a candid readiness read, the specific places in your business where AI would create value, and an honest not yet or not this if that’s the truth. No written deliverable, no roadmap, no audit. Just a senior operator’s read on your situation.
A paid session, credited toward anything you start with us within 60 days.
The fee exists to make it a real working conversation rather than a sales call with a nicer name.
“We’re serious. Tell us what’s actually wrong”
AI Operations Assessment
The diagnostic. A senior review of your data, your processes, and how the work actually moves, ending in a document you own whether or not you build anything with us.
You get a data readiness review, process mapping of the workflows we’d target, a scored readiness and gap map, and a prioritised plan of which AI employees to build and in what order.
A fixed fee, set by how deep the review needs to go and how complex the business is. Paid in full to start, and credited toward the build if you go ahead within 60 days.
This is worth having on its own. Plenty of firms would take this document and implement in-house, and that’s a legitimate outcome.
“We want the foundation. We’ll take it from there”
Ground Truth Foundation Build
The two layers that have to exist before AI does anything useful. Your business information organised so it can be used safely, and your processes turned into documented, executable skills. Plus the data-protection architecture configured for your situation.
You end up with how the work runs today and how it should run with AI employees in it, with the approval points marked. Yours to keep, yours to build on, with us or without us.
A one-time engagement, priced on scope. Fifty percent to start, twenty-five at the midpoint, twenty-five on delivery.
“Build it and run it for us”
Managed AI Workforce
The main engagement, and the one most clients are actually looking for.
The foundation above is included, not billed twice. On top of it we build your AI employees around your real process, launch them through recorded review gates after your sign-off, deploy them on the channels your clients already use, and then operate them. Monitoring, tuning, and improvement are ongoing, and improvements reach you as proposals rather than as changes you discover later.
One or two full functions to start, structured around wherever you want to begin. A human approves anything consequential. Sensitive client details are stripped out before a message reaches an outside model. Every action lands in a plain-language record.
A one-time setup, then a monthly fee to operate it. The setup scopes upward with how messy the information is and how many functions you start with. The monthly moves with run volume and how much management the workforce needs. Setup is fifty, twenty-five, twenty-five; monthly is billed in advance.
“This is working. Expand it across the business”
AI Operations Partner
For clients already running a managed workforce who want to treat it as core infrastructure rather than a project.
Everything above, plus a continuing roadmap of new AI employees, expansion across departments and functions, priority build and response, higher run capacity, and quarterly strategic review with Fiorella’s operations lens on the business rather than just the workforce.
A monthly fee, scaling with the number of AI employees, the departments they cover, and volume. Expansion builds are quoted separately.
“We want to build it ourselves. We need the thinking”
AI Strategy Retainer
Not on the managed track, and deliberately so. Some companies have internal capability and want a senior strategist to shape the direction rather than a firm to do the work.
Recurring strategy sessions, an AI and technology roadmap with priorities, vendor and tool rationalisation, guidance on whether your data and processes are ready, and honest build-versus-buy counsel. Execution stays with you.
A monthly retainer, scaled to how often we meet and how much ground we’re covering.
To be clear about what this isn’t: no building, no AI employees deployed, no platform, no implementation labour. If you’d rather we did the work, that’s a different engagement and we’ll say so.
Things that get quoted on top
Additional AI employees beyond the scoped set. Additional channels not already built. Additional departments, functions, or workflows. And regulated or HIPAA-compliant infrastructure, which is a higher initial fee because building that part properly is more work. It isn’t excluded, it’s priced.
What we don’t do
No guarantees, at any level. Not a percentage, not an hours-saved figure, not a revenue number. We’d be inventing them. What we do instead is agree on what we’re solving before the build and hand you a written picture of how the work runs today, so there’s something real to measure against.
No double-billing the foundation. If you move from assessment to build, the assessment fee credits. If you take the managed engagement, the foundation is in it.
No number before we’ve looked. Not because we’re being difficult, but because a figure invented across a table would be worth less than no figure at all. The proposal is the number, and it’s the only thing that binds either of us.
Not sure which of these you are?
That’s what a discovery call is for, and it’s free. Fifteen or twenty minutes, then an honest read on which of these fits, including the version where none of them do. If you’d rather go deeper before deciding anything, the Reality Check is the longer version of that conversation.
Or write to hello@thewayfinderOS.com and tell us in three sentences what your business does and where it hurts. A person will answer you.