A technology leader at a mid-market services company put it bluntly in a working session with us: everybody was doing their own thing with AI. People were pasting company spreadsheets into free personal ChatGPT accounts, and that data was leaving the building for good. As someone in the room quipped, the public models were getting […]
That’s $29k per employee. Per year. In a recent Augusto leadership meeting, the point was made that our client roundtables generate a massive amount of intelligence worth sharing across the company. Nobody in the room treated that as a nice sentiment. We treated it as an operating requirement, because we had already built the system […]
Every mid-market operations leader we meet eventually asks this question, usually with some dread behind it. The ERP runs the business. It has for fifteen or twenty years, and it works. Yet every AI conversation now seems to end at the same wall: our system was never built for this. In one recent working session, […]
When automation comes up in a leadership meeting, the first question is rarely about features. On a recent call, an executive at a manufacturer asked us directly: are you working in environments we already have, or are you bringing a whole new platform we will have to staff and pay for? That is the right […]
Ask about the benefits of cloud computing in 2019 and you got a familiar list: lower costs, scalability, remote access. Ask in 2026 and the honest answer is different. We recently sat with the IT team at a mid-market manufacturer where on-prem hardware is what gets approved, largely for CapEx reasons. They have a stable […]
Picture a marketing team of five people supporting a business unit measured in billions. That is a real conversation we had with a marketing leader at a large manufacturer, and it captures where most mid-market teams sit. The mandate keeps growing. The headcount does not. AI automation is the obvious answer, and most leaders have […]
Search for an AI consultant in Michigan and you will find no shortage of options. National firms with impressive decks. Boutique shops with one specialty. Freelancers who built something clever last year. Sorting real capability from good marketing is the hard part, especially if you have never bought AI work before. If you want the […]
Most AI projects do not stall because the technology is weak. They stall because nobody decided how much freedom the AI should have before it went live. That sounds like an engineering detail, yet it is a business call about risk, and it belongs to leadership. Here is the choice in plain terms. A deterministic […]
Three out of four mid-market leaders already say AI is paying off. Only 6% say their data is ready to scale it. That is the finding from Dun & Bradstreet’s survey of 10,000 businesses: measurable AI returns are now normal, and readiness, not model capability, is the gap. July’s news is best read as evidence […]