We don't sell AI advice. We install AI systems you own.
Strategyc builds agentic AI into your business on infrastructure you control: your accounts, your data, your workflows. Pay once to build it. It keeps running whether or not we're in the room.
$3,000, credited in full toward your install. You leave with the map either way.
What is an AI implementation partner?
An AI implementation partner builds and installs working AI systems, agentic workflows, and automation inside your business, on infrastructure you own, instead of selling advice or renting access. Strategyc installs these systems for owner-led service businesses ($3M to $50M) that the Big 4 won't take on and internal teams can't build alone.
An AI implementation partner is a company that builds, installs, and hands over working AI systems inside your business, rather than advising you on strategy or selling AI software by subscription. The systems run on your accounts, using your data, and your team is trained to operate them. That is the core difference from an AI consultant, who typically delivers a strategy document, and an AI automation agency, who typically keeps you paying monthly for access you lose the moment you cancel. An implementation partner's job ends when the system is live, documented, and owned outright by you.
You already tried this. Twice, probably.
You've tried it. A few evenings with ChatGPT, maybe a tool one of your guys found. It wrote a decent email, then it made something up, and it never touched the actual work: the quotes, the follow-up, the paperwork that eats your week. So it sat there, and you went back to doing it the old way.
Maybe you've also paid an agency that promised the machine and delivered a login. The day you stopped paying, everything stopped working, because you never owned any of it.
Neither of those was the wrong instinct. They were the wrong tool and the wrong model. The work you wanted handled is still there every Tuesday, and it is still yours. And the gap between you and the operators who figured this out keeps getting wider.
The question was never which app to subscribe to.
It's what work you want handled, permanently, by a system you control.
You pay once to build it. You own the accounts, the data, the workflow, the logins. Your team runs it. It keeps working the day after we finish, the month after, the year after. Nothing is held hostage, because there's no meter to switch off.
- You pay monthly, forever.
- It lives on their platform, under their logins.
- Cancel, and it stops working the same day.
- Ask for the keys and watch what happens.
- You pay once to build it.
- It lives in your accounts, on your data.
- Cancel the optional maintenance, and it keeps running.
- The runbook is yours from day one.
That's the whole difference. Agencies rent you results. Consultants sell you a deck. We install a system you own.
AI consultant vs. AI implementation partner vs. Big 4
A consultant tells you what to do. A software vendor sells you a tool and leaves you to wire it up. An implementation partner does the middle part neither of them will: builds the working system, connects it to how your business actually runs, trains your team, and hands you the keys. Here is the difference laid out plainly.
| Comparison area | AI consultant | Strategyc (AI implementation partner) | Big 4 / enterprise firm |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you get | A strategy deck, a roadmap, recommendations | A working AI system, built, tested, and installed in your business | A strategy engagement, often followed by a separate integrator build proposal |
| What you own when it ends | The document | The system: your accounts, your data, your workflows | Depends on the contract; rarely a single owned deliverable |
| Typical engagement minimum | None fixed; sold by the hour or day | A $3,000 audit; installs typically $12,000 to $35,000, one time | Eight figures is the norm; smaller engagements are rare |
| Timeline to something working | Advice ships in weeks; nothing runs until someone builds it | Weeks from audit to a live system | Months to years, phased rollouts |
| Who it's for | Businesses that want a plan, not a build | Owner-led service businesses, roughly $3M to $50M, ready to build now | Enterprise and Fortune 500 accounts |
| What happens if you stop paying | The advice you already got stays advice | The system keeps running; managed operations is optional, cancel anytime | Typically the integrator relationship has to continue |
The gap under the big firms is real, and it's open.
Up to $200B
BCG projects up to $200 billion in net-new demand for agentic AI services over the next five years, as adoption moves from pilots to scale.
3 out of 4
75% of enterprises surveyed by BCG say they want to work with service providers to build or implement their priority agentic AI use cases.
Source: BCG, "The $200 Billion Agentic AI Opportunity for Tech Service Providers," February 2026.
The biggest firms are moving up-market to chase that demand, and they are built for eight-figure engagements. That leaves owner-led businesses doing $3M to $50M with real AI work to be done and almost nobody sized to do it.
The platform vendors sell the capability. Almost nobody does the work underneath it: connecting the tools to your data, making them reliable enough to trust, keeping them running as the models change. That work is the gap. That is what we install.
Start with the map. Then build one system. Then decide if you ever need us again.
AI Opportunity Audit
$3,000
Becomes your first payment on the buildOne working session, then a written map of where AI removes cost, hours, or lag in your specific operation. Named systems, ranked by payback, in build order, with a buy-vs-build call on each. Commission an install within 30 days of receiving your map, while it is current, and the full $3,000 becomes your first payment on the build. Either way, the map is yours.
If the numbers on your business don't clear the bar for an install, we'll tell you that in writing and tell you not to hire us. You keep the map either way.
AI System Install
$12,000 to $35,000
one time
We take the work that eats your week and hand it back done: quote-to-proposal automation, inbound lead qualification and routing, invoices and paperwork filed without a person touching them, reporting that assembles itself. Built on infrastructure you own: your accounts, your data, your logins. Documented, your team trained to run it, scoped from your audit so you know exactly what gets built before we start. A working system you own outright, not a login you rent. Priced by complexity, not seat count.
audit fee credited here
Managed AI Operations
$1,500 to $6,000 a month
Monitoring, tuning, model updates, new automations as the business changes. You own the system either way. Some owners keep us on, some take it in-house after training. Both are fine. It's your system.
Every install is scoped by proposal from your audit. The price moves when the scope moves. That is the only thing that moves it.
What it costs, honestly.
Most pages hide this. Here's the real shape of it, because you're going to ask anyway and the answer is a fair one.
- AI Opportunity Audit: $3,000, and it becomes your first payment on the build if you proceed within 30 days.
- AI System Install: $12,000 to $35,000 per system, one time.
- Managed AI Operations (optional): $1,500 to $6,000 a month, cancel anytime. Everything keeps running when you leave.
For comparison: a $5,000 a month agency retainer is $60,000 a year, forever, and you own nothing the day you stop paying.
What moves the price
How many systems you install, how many tools and data sources have to be connected, how messy your current data is, and how high the reliability bar sits. A system where a failure means a missed job and an angry customer costs more to build than one where a mistake is a minor annoyance. That's the honest reason for the range.
When you should not hire us
- You're under about $3M in revenue. The math usually doesn't clear the bar yet. Use off-the-shelf tools first.
- You can't name a specific, expensive bottleneck. If there's no number to build against, there's nothing to install against.
- You want someone to run it for you forever and never own it. That's an agency, and there are good ones. It isn't us.
- Your real problem is a people or process problem. AI will make a broken process fail faster, not fix it.
- You just want to experiment cheaply. Open ChatGPT. That's the right first move, and it's free.
Four steps. No black box.
Audit
We map where AI actually earns its keep in your operation, ranked by payback.
Install
We build one system on infrastructure you own.
Train
Your team runs it. You get the runbook.
Optional
We maintain it while you grow, or you take it in-house. Both are fine.
No guesswork. No black box. No dependency.
We take on two to three installs per quarter. Build weeks are blocked in advance, so installs start on fixed dates; when a quarter is full, the next start is the following quarter. The audit is how a slot gets scoped and held.
A guarantee with a date and a definition in it.
Before we build anything, we write the scope down: which systems, what each one does, what "working" means, and the go-live date. You sign it, we sign it, and that document is the standard we are held to.
You define "working" with us before you sign, in your numbers, not our adjectives: quotes out in under a set number of minutes, leads routed within a set window, documents processed to a named accuracy bar. If a scope document doesn't have a measurable pass-or-fail line for every system in it, don't sign it. From us or from anyone.
Your systems live, working as scoped, and your team trained by the date in your signed build plan. If we miss that date, we keep building at our own cost until it's live as scoped. If we still can't deliver it, we refund the install and you keep everything we built, in your accounts, with the documentation.
We can offer that because the system lives on your infrastructure from day one. There is nothing for us to take back, so there is nothing for us to hold hostage.
The audit is where every install starts, and where some honestly end. Map your business first.
See What the Audit CoversProof, not promises.
Most agencies show you a portfolio. We'll show you what the systems actually produce, how fast, and what it cost to run.
firms profiled in depth
public bids tracked, 16 over $10M
not months
compute cost
One run. A few hours. Here's what came out.
We pointed the systems at a single regional market. In a few hours of runtime, a pipeline of more than a hundred AI agents mapped a 190-firm field, profiled 66 firms in depth, and wrote the top 20 up as full dossiers: a 114-page, two-part intelligence package with a 130-item public bid calendar, sixteen packages over $10M flagged, and vendor and procurement pathway maps.
None of it is taken on trust. Every bid entry links back to the issuing agency's own published record, and a separate adversarial QA pass audited all 20 dossiers for factual accuracy before anything shipped.
The compute cost: about $140. Generating pages is the cheap part. Building a system whose output you can act on without re-checking every line is the work, and that is what an install buys.
That's the whole package, redacted. We're not showing you the names. We're showing you the shape and the depth of what one operator now has that his competitors don't.
Sit with what that actually means.
This is not something an employee ever builds. Not because they aren't capable, but because it is weeks of full-time research that never reaches the top of anyone's list, and by the time it did, half of it would be stale. So it never gets done. The bids stay buried across separate agency portals, and you keep quoting the handful you happened to hear about.
Sixteen packages over $10M you never would have found, each one traced back to the agency that published it, sitting in a single calendar with the deadlines and the procurement path attached. That is not a nice-to-have report. That is millions of dollars of public bids that were always there and always invisible, because nobody in your business had the hours to go and find them.
Put a system like this in your market and you walk into rooms your competitors don't know exist. You quote work they never saw. You're early on deadlines they'll hear about too late, if at all. You look like you run a research department, because now you do, and it runs in a few hours for the cost of a good dinner. That is the difference between a report and a system you own: the report is out of date the day you read it; a system you own runs again next week, and the week after that.
This isn't a demo. It's what we run on.
These are the same systems we operate every day across our own companies: around 50 reusable workflows, a multi-tenant content engine, agentic research and intelligence pipelines, and automated reporting. They don't only run for us, either. A property investment group, for example, runs on the content engine: onboarded end to end, now publishing structured, search-and-AI-ready articles on autopilot.
We don't sell you a system we wouldn't run ourselves. We run this one.
None of this is a service you rent from us. It's a system you own. The proof is simply what it does once it's installed in your business.
"Our own companies" means the businesses we operate ourselves, not a client-count claim. The work sample above was produced for an operator we work with directly.
That's what one run produced for one operator. The audit is how you find out what one run would find in yours.
Apply for the AuditWho else you're comparing us to. Honestly.
Why not a big firm?
The Big 4 do serious work, built for eight-figure engagements with a runway to match. At $3M to $50M you're below their line, or you're their smallest, slowest account, staffed with juniors and billed for the deck. You want the partner who picks up the phone and ships in weeks.
Why not a freelancer?
A good freelancer can wire up one automation. Then they move on, and you own a black box nobody left instructions for. We build the system, document it, train your team, and put it on your accounts, not ours. When it's done, you don't depend on the person who built it.
Why not just do it yourself with ChatGPT?
You can, for the easy wins. The hard part isn't the prompt. It's connecting the tools to your data, making it reliable enough to trust with real work, and keeping it running when the model changes underneath you. That's the difference between a clever demo and a system that quietly does the job every day. That's what we install.
Why not an AI automation agency?
Search "AI automation agency" and you'll find plenty of options. Most rent you access to a tool or a dashboard, and the automations live on their platform, not yours. Cancel, and it stops working the same day. We build inside your accounts, on your data, and hand you the keys when it's done. Call us whatever gets you to the right page. What matters is what you still own the day after you stop paying us.
Strategyc is run by Alastair Macartney, former British Army Major. He directed the UK's Defence Courier Service: secure material carried worldwide on a $7M budget at a zero-error rate, because delivery is a discipline, not a hope. He builds agentic AI to the same standard, and the thesis behind this page is his: own the systems your business runs on. Never rent the thing you can't afford to lose. (Also a BASE jumping World Champion, in a former life.)
More about Alastair and how we workQuestions owners actually ask.
It installs working AI systems inside your business instead of advising you about them. In practice that means connecting AI tools to your real data, automating specific workflows (quoting, lead routing, paperwork, reporting), making them reliable enough to trust, training your team, and handing you the system on your own accounts. You end up with something that runs, not a strategy document.
Strategyc's AI Opportunity Audit is $3,000, credited in full toward a build if you proceed within 30 days. An AI System Install typically runs $12,000 to $35,000, one time, priced by complexity, not seat count. Optional Managed AI Operations run $1,500 to $6,000 a month, cancel anytime. There is no retainer at any stage.
Only if you have a specific, expensive bottleneck and no one internal who can build the fix reliably. If you're under about $3M in revenue, or you can't name what's actually costing you money and hours, you don't need us yet. Start with off-the-shelf tools. If you can name the drag and it's real, an audit will tell you fast whether the numbers work.
Their model is built for enterprise engagements: large teams, long runways, eight-figure budgets. A business doing $3M to $50M is below their minimum or becomes their smallest, slowest account. BCG projects up to $200B in net-new demand for agentic AI services over five years (BCG, 2026). Most owner-led businesses sit far below the engagement sizes those firms staff for. That gap is exactly who we build for.
Usually, yes. Most owners who try ChatGPT get the easy wins, a prompt here, a summary there, then hit the hard part: connecting the tool to their actual data, making it reliable enough to trust with real work, and keeping it running when the model changes underneath them. That gap between a clever demo and a system that quietly works every day is what an implementation partner installs.
Weeks, not quarters. The audit takes one to two weeks and produces a ranked map. A single system install is typically a few weeks of build once it's scoped, because we install one system properly rather than launching a sprawling program. You approve, we build, your team is trained, and it's live.
Nothing stops. That's the entire point. The system lives on your accounts, your data, your infrastructure, with a runbook your team already knows how to use. Cancel the optional monthly management and everything keeps running. If Strategyc vanished tomorrow, any competent automation contractor could maintain what you own. Ask any agency you've worked with for that and watch their face.
See where AI actually pays off in your business.
We take on two to three installs a quarter, because the founder scopes and leads every one. If the work you want off your plate is still on it, this is the next step. Worst case, you're out one working session and holding a build map your competitors don't have.
Apply for the AI Opportunity Audit
A working session with the founder, plus a written map of where AI pays off in your specific operation, ranked by payback. $3,000, credited in full toward your install if you go ahead within 30 days. We run a small number of these each month. If your numbers clearly fit, you'll see the calendar straight away. If it's not obvious either way, Alastair reads the application himself and replies within one business day.