The hard part isn’t the tools. It’s the decisions.
And most of the evidence you’d use to make them was written by the people selling the product.
Mid-market companies have adopted AI almost everywhere, but embedded it in only a fraction of how they operate. About 86% have partly or fully integrated AI, yet only about 36% have it fully embedded across core processes. The barriers they report aren’t the tools: data quality, security and privacy, legacy integration, and talent and skills each come up for roughly 28% to 34% of respondents. Even among larger enterprises, only about a quarter have moved 40% or more of their pilots into production.
That leaves executives making high-stakes calls (which vendor, how much budget, what to tell the board) on thin evidence. In GAP’s own review of 100 mid-market AI use cases, only 44 had a named company example, and nearly all of the quantified results were reported by the vendors themselves. Products are consolidating quickly, and the real constraints rarely show up in a sales pitch.
The usual options each fall short:
A 12-week strategy study is slow, and it often ends as a deck with little engineering reality in it.
A vendor’s engineers know their product well, but they aren’t neutral.
Your internal teams are already stretched.
Generic research doesn’t know your systems.
Meanwhile, leaders are often ahead of their people. About 85% of mid-market respondents say leadership is more enthusiastic about AI than employees are.
Five decisions that are hard to make alone.
Tick the ones that sound like your calendar. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.
Tick whatever sounds familiar. There’s no wrong answer.
See the packagesWhat it looks like from your seat.
The pressures differ by role, and so do the first conversations. Pick yours.
Chief Executive Officer
What’s on your plate
Pressure from the board and the market to have an AI strategy, no easy way to tell which AI claims are real, and a worry about betting on the wrong things or moving too slowly.
How advisors help
Plain-language counsel on what’s mature enough to bet on versus market noise, board-ready messaging on risk, ROI, and governance, and a short list of two or three initiatives with a clear return.
1 / 6Chief Technology Officer
What’s on your plate
Pilots that don’t reach production, legacy systems blocking AI, pressure to approve vendors and architectures, and concerns about governance and intellectual property.
How advisors help
Architecture counsel grounded in production experience, covering retrieval, fine-tuning, evaluation, latency, fallback design, and hosting cost.
Typical first topics: legacy modernization, an AI gateway, and governed coding agents.
2 / 6Chief Financial Officer
What’s on your plate
Often owns the AI budget, token and hosting costs are hard to forecast, and finance teams spend real time checking AI output.
How advisors help
Rigorous capital and token-cost sanity checks, and an ROI gate for every pilot.
Typical first topics: agentic close, collections and cash application, and payments fraud controls.
3 / 6Chief Information Officer
What’s on your plate
Shadow AI, SaaS sprawl, vendor consolidation, and ERP and CRM vendors switching on their own native agents.
How advisors help
Vendor vetting that cuts through the marketing, exit-rights guidance for contracts, and a sanctioned-tool approach.
Typical first topics: SaaS license rightsizing, an IT service desk agent, and shadow AI discovery.
4 / 6Chief Operating Officer
What’s on your plate
High-volume manual work in orders, documents, and planning, and unclear ownership of agents.
How advisors help
Workflow redesign with a named owner, a measure, and a stop procedure for every agent.
Typical first topics: order and document intake, demand forecasting, and master data.
5 / 6Chief AI Officer
What’s on your plate
Coordinating the CFO, CTO, and data leaders without building a parallel team, pilots with no owners or measures, and AI policy and vendor risk.
How advisors help
A senior sounding board and second opinion: a value gate for every pilot, AI policy and risk appetite, a vendor checklist, and one evaluation standard for every agent.
6 / 6
An illustrative week. A CFO is asked how much to budget for AI. In a 30-minute call, an advisor sanity-checks the hosting and token-cost assumptions in a vendor quote and recommends a smaller pilot with a before-and-after measure. The same week, a short decision memo gives the CFO a one-page recommendation to take to the board. (Illustrative example. Written memos are part of the Extended package.)
What the conversations cover.
Whatever is on your desk, usually within one of five areas.
Feasibility and hype
What’s mature enough to bet on, and what’s market noise.
Business strategy
Capital allocation, risk governance, and how to message AI to the board.
Use cases
Narrowing a long list of ideas to the two or three with a clear return, starting where the work, the data, and the measure already exist.
Workflows
Redesigning core operations and deciding who owns what, including every agent.
Architecture
Build versus buy, platform choice, and the data hygiene that makes either work.
How the engagement runs.
The rhythm of a premium consulting relationship, without the weight of a long engagement.
Start with a short charter
Week one
You and GAP agree on objectives, first priorities, how you’ll communicate, and when office hours will happen. You name one executive sponsor and give us access to the relevant leaders in the first month.
Meet every week
Office hours
A one-hour video session each week, on the day you choose, for deep dives on pitch decks, vendor quotes, and live decisions.
Get quick answers in between
On-demand counsel
Quick questions go into a shared Slack or Teams channel, with same-day answers during business hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central, Monday to Friday). Email gets a reply within one business day. Urgent decisions can be booked as 30-minute calls, with a callback within four business hours.
Rebalance each month
Monthly steering conversation
You re-balance the month’s hours across topics, review the register of decisions made, and recalibrate priorities, all within the scope of your package.
Get it in writing
Written deliverables
Both packages include a monthly advisory note covering hours used, decisions discussed, and open questions. Extended adds decision memos, architecture points of view, workflow redesign, and written recommendations, all written for an executive reader and owned by you. A board-ready quarterly readout, presented in 60 minutes, is available on request.
Turn advice into action when you’re ready
Path to action
When a conversation points to work that needs doing, advisors connect it to a follow-on project, such as an AI readiness scan, a workshop, or a data, technology, or AI strategy review, or to delivery work from GAP’s other services. Each is scoped and quoted separately.
How we think about this work.
Builders, not analysts
Our advisors have built and run production systems. They can tell you what actually breaks, including latency, fallback design, hosting costs, and evaluation, which generic market research can’t.
Vendor-neutral by design
Advisors have no platform bias, and any GAP build work is quoted separately, so advice is aimed at your business case. You own every deliverable. If the right answer is to buy a product or build in-house, that’s what you’ll hear.
Senior access, fast response
Weekly office hours with senior advisors matched to your topic, same-day answers in chat during business hours, and written replies within one business day.
Strategy and the code behind it
One conversation can cover the board narrative and the architecture underneath it. Many firms offer AI strategy. Fewer can tell you what a pilot will cost to host and where it will break in production.
Two packages, one fixed monthly fee.
No time-and-materials surprises. Start with whichever fits, and move between them as needs change.
Core: $5,000 a month for 10 advisory hours
A senior sounding board. It includes weekly one-hour office hours, other advisory conversations, a monthly steering conversation, a quarterly executive readout on request, and a monthly advisory note.
Extended: $10,000 a month for 20 advisory hours
Everything in Core, plus structured review of documents you share, written points of view and decision memos, and GAP participation in leadership meetings, vendor evaluations, and board preparation.
Follow-on projects, quoted separately
When advice points to work, we can scope it as a readiness scan, workshop, or strategy review, or connect you to the right GAP delivery team.
Hours reset each month and don’t roll over. There’s a six-month initial term, then month-to-month with 30 days’ notice.
Bring the next AI decision you need to get right.
Questions people ask before they start.
We already have a consulting firm, or our internal team can handle this.
This complements them. Most consulting studies run for months and end in a deck. We give your leaders a senior second opinion on a weekly rhythm, grounded in production engineering, so vendor claims, budgets, and architectures get pressure-tested as decisions come up. Your team and your consultants keep doing their work.
How do we know you’re vendor-neutral when GAP also sells delivery?
It’s a fair question. Advisors have no platform bias, and any GAP build work is quoted separately, so you can judge it on its own merits. You own every deliverable.
A retainer feels like a commitment. What if we don’t use all the hours?
Hours reset each month with no rollover, which is why we plan them with you. A weekly office hour keeps momentum, and the monthly steering conversation lets you shift hours toward whatever matters most that month. You can also move between Core and Extended at the start of any month with 30 days’ notice.
Can’t we just use ChatGPT or read the analyst reports?
They’re useful for background, but they don’t know your systems, and most quantified results in the market are reported by the vendors themselves. We help you separate what’s achievable from what’s typical, and we ground each recommendation in what it takes to run in production: latency, hosting, cost, and governance.
We need someone to do the work, not just advise.
Advice is the first step. It narrows the list to the two or three initiatives that will pay back and defines what good looks like. When you’re ready to build, we can connect you to a GAP delivery team, scoped and quoted separately.
How fast will we get answers?
Chat questions get same-day answers during business hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central, Monday to Friday. Email is answered within one business day. For urgent decisions you can book a 30-minute call, and we’ll call back within four business hours.
Will we work with the same advisor throughout?
Advisors are matched to the topic at hand and may change over the term. You aren’t charged for re-briefing a new advisor.
Who owns what you write?
You do. Every deliverable belongs to you, while GAP retains its own frameworks and methods.
Is this legal, financial, or compliance advice?
No. Advisors give business and technology counsel. For legal, financial, or compliance questions, you’ll still want the relevant specialists in the room.