AI for small & mid-sized businesses

Real AI expertise. Without building an AI team.

Most small and mid-sized businesses don't need a research lab — they need someone who has actually built production AI to deliver a clear-eyed plan: where AI pays off, what data it requires, and how to deploy it without creating risk they can't govern. That's the work.

Find where AI pays off See what we've built
Strategy & roadmap in weeks Honest, right-sized scope Guardrails built in
AI Use-Case Intake RankedIn flightStalled
Use caseAligns toROI signalStatus
Invoice data extractionFinance opsMargin
92
In flight
Customer email triageServiceRetention
81
Scoping
Contract renewal alertsOperationsRisk
74
Queued
Demand forecastingSupply chainGrowth
56
Data first
Scored against roadmap & missionIllustrative example
01 / The bottom line

AI isn't magic. It's leverage — in the right places.

AI can make a real difference to your bottom line — if you know where to apply it. We analyze how your business actually runs, process by process, and quickly identify where AI earns its keep. Just as important: where it doesn't.

Process analysis Order-to-cash · illustrative
  1. Order intakeEmails, PDFs, portal formsAI fitsHigh volume, unstructured — extract & classify
  2. Entry into ERPCopying fields acrossAutomate — no AIClear rules. Plain automation is cheaper and safer
  3. Pricing exceptionsDiscounts, special termsAI assistsJudgment call — AI drafts, a person decides
  4. Collections follow-upReminders & status checksAI fitsRepetitive, personalized drafting at scale
  5. Key account callsRenewals, escalationsKeep humanRelationships are the business
2 of 5 steps are a fit for AI — and that's the point

✓AI is the right tool when…

  • The work is high-volume and repetitive
  • Inputs are messy — documents, emails, free text
  • It's pattern recognition a person can quickly check
  • The data to support it actually exists

×AI is the wrong tool when…

  • Simple rules would do the job — automate instead
  • A mistake is costly and no one reviews the output
  • The data isn't there yet — fix that first
  • It's a solution looking for a problem

Knowing the difference comes from having shipped it — and having seen what happens when it's applied in the wrong place.

Let us show you. Walk us through how work gets done today and we'll point to where AI can drive real efficiency gains — and where it won't.

Get your processes analyzed
02 / Point of view

AI doesn't fix bad data.

AI can help you clean data, profile it, reconcile it. What it cannot do is work around it. Feed a model bad data and you don't get a broken answer you'd notice — you get a confident one, faster and at greater scale than you could produce it before.

Data you can trust. AI that pays off.

The first half makes the second possible, especially when no one on the team has shipped AI before and knows what a confident wrong answer looks like. So we build the unglamorous parts first: the data readiness, the evaluation, the governance. Then the impressive parts actually hold.

03 / Who it's for

For teams that need AI expertise they don't have in-house.

Your people know your business better than anyone. What's missing is someone who has designed, shipped, and governed AI in production — and can bring that to you now, not after a year-long hiring search.

Sound familiar?

"Nobody here really does AI."

Your team is strong — just not in LLMs, machine learning, or AI governance. And hiring that talent is slow, expensive, and hard to evaluate.

→You get senior, hands-on AI expertise now — and your team learns alongside us, so the know-how stays in-house.
Sound familiar?

"Everyone says we need AI. For what?"

You're getting pitched constantly and none of it maps to the problems actually costing you time and money.

→We score your use cases against your roadmap and start with the one carrying the strongest ROI signal.
Sound familiar?

"Our data lives in spreadsheets."

Customer lists in one place, contracts in a shared drive, the real process in someone's head.

→Data readiness comes first, so the AI you deploy gives answers you can trust.
04 / Built on Airtable

AI where your team already works.

You probably don't need a new platform. Some of the highest-ROI AI solutions we've delivered live inside Airtable — a tool a non-technical team can actually run, extend, and own.

Built by our founder while leading Applied AI Delivery at DLA Piper Each one is a pattern, not a one-off
Strategy · Project management

Use-Case Prioritization Engine

A use-case database that scores every incoming AI request against the company's roadmap and mission, and surfaces the ones carrying the strongest ROI signal — turning intake from a queue into a prioritization engine.

It doubles as a lightweight project tracker, giving leadership one view of what's in flight, what's stalled, and what deserves funding next.

Request in→Scored vs. roadmap→Ranked by ROI→Tracked to delivery
AI scoringRoadmap alignmentPortfolio view
Private equity

Deal Tracking Dashboard

A deal pipeline dashboard for private equity, with high-level checklist tracking on every deal — so nothing slips between signing and close.

PipelineChecklistsDashboards
Document intelligence

Agreement Extraction & Relocation Notices

When a company moves, it may be legally required to notify every customer. This app extracts the relevant terms from the agreements, identifies the parties and the required notification method for each, and automates the mail merge.

Now it's being used to surface other material insights across the entire corpus of agreements.

Agreements→Terms extracted→Parties + methods→Notices sent
Term extractionMail merge automationCorpus insights
Testing · Compliance

Synthetic Data Generator

Generates realistic synthetic data for testing ad policies — so rules can be exercised against the edge cases that matter without putting real customer data in front of a test.

Synthetic dataPolicy testingPrivacy by design

Got a process that lives in spreadsheets and email? That's usually the best place to start. These patterns adapt to a new business in weeks, not quarters.

Talk through your use case →
05 / Approach

A strategy and roadmap, in weeks.

The same discipline we bring to regulated enterprise environments, scoped to what your business actually needs. No padded engagements. No year-long discovery phase.

Where most engagements start

AI Strategy & Roadmap

A focused, fast engagement that leaves you knowing exactly where AI fits, what it takes, and what to do first — whether you build with us afterward or not.

Weeks, not quartersClear scope up frontYours to keep
  • 01Prioritized AI use cases, scored against your goals
  • 02Data readiness assessment — what's usable, what's not
  • 03A phased roadmap with the first win clearly defined
  • 04Guardrails and governance sized to your team
01

Analyze your processes

Walk through how work actually gets done, pinpoint where AI drives efficiency gains, and pick the one with the clearest return. No AI for AI's sake.

02

Get the data ready

Completeness, lineage, timeliness. Know what the model will be fed before anything gets built on top of it.

03

Build on tools you own

Airtable, the SaaS you already pay for, or a light custom app — whatever your team can run without calling us.

04

Govern, then hand off

Evaluation, human oversight, and documentation, so it keeps working after we're gone.

Guardrails are a feature, not an afterthought. Responsible AI isn't a compliance tax — it's what lets your team trust what it deployed.

06 / Services

What we work on.

01

AI strategy & roadmapping

A clear-eyed plan for where AI pays off in your business — and where it doesn't.

02

Airtable AI solutions

Prioritization, extraction, tracking, and automation built inside a tool your team can own.

03

Data readiness

Getting scattered spreadsheets, documents, and SaaS data into shape a model can trust.

04

Process automation

Taking the repetitive work — notices, intake, reconciliation — off your team's plate.

05

LLM & RAG solutions

Assistants and search grounded in your own documents, not the open internet.

06

Responsible AI governance

Evaluation, oversight, and guardrails sized for a small team — without the bureaucracy.

07 / The Lab

What we're building, in the open.

Alongside client work, we build our own tools — to keep our instincts sharp and to put real AI in the hands of people who can't expense an enterprise contract.

In the lab · ETA October 2026

Agentic Semantic Search — built for research.

Semantic search, built with agentic intelligence — agents that plan the query, chase down sources, and reason over what they find. Enterprise-grade retrieval, the kind that normally carries an enterprise-grade invoice, at zero cost to the people using it.

Everyone should have real AI search at their fingertips. It shouldn't sit behind a paywall for the few who can expense it.

Agentic retrievalSemantic searchResearch-gradeFree to use
Part of Agentic Web Intelligence — our open-source platform
  1. 01Agentic Semantic SearchThe first slice — in the lab now
  2. 02Governed discovery & extractionApproved tools behind a policy boundary
  3. 03Agent research workflowsDocumented, observable, deployable
Follow the build on GitHub · Apache 2.0 →
Shipped in weeks · iOS Scavenger Go — a location-based mobile app taken from idea to working product in weeks, not quarters. scavenger-go.com →
08 / Who you'll work with

Receipts. Not buzzwords.

0+

Years building data & engineering organizations

0+

Applied AI solutions delivered at DLA Piper

$0K+

Annual operating costs cut with one data platform

0M+

Commercial locations analyzed by an AI system our founder directed

AI Force Consulting is run by Jon Carlisle — The Data Juggernaut. Twenty years working in the data, not above it: from data architecture, to a master's in predictive analytics at Northwestern, to growing a global engineering org across three countries, to leading Applied AI Delivery at one of the world's largest law firms.

Jon has stayed hands-on the whole way. You can't set direction on AI systems you've never built, and you can't govern what you don't understand. That's what small and mid-sized businesses get here: enterprise-grade AI expertise, applied to your business — without the enterprise-grade invoice.

// vital stats
basedEvanston, IL
educationMSPA, Northwestern
still_codesPython, daily
superpowerProduction-ready AI
kryptoniteBad data hygiene
datajuggernaut.com →
09 / Contact

Let's build something good.

Trying to figure out where AI actually fits in your business? Our inbox is open.

hello@aiforceconsulting.com →
Small & mid-sized businesses·Strategy & roadmap in weeks·Evanston, IL