AI Consulting & Advisory
Most AI projects fail long before the code does. They fail at the point where somebody picked the wrong problem. We start there: a hard look at your workflows, your data and your systems, and an honest answer about what is worth automating, what is not, and what it would actually cost.
Your board wants a strategy, your vendors want a contract, and your team is split between "this changes everything" and "this is a toy". None of that tells you which of your actual workflows would benefit.
A demo on ten documents is not a system that handles ten thousand with an audit trail, a cost ceiling and someone accountable when it is wrong. The gap between those two things is where budgets disappear.
When three vendors quote the same project at wildly different numbers, the problem is usually that the scope was never technically defined. You need someone on your side of the table who can read the architecture.
In this section
A fixed-fee, fixed-scope engagement. We interview the people doing the work, trace how information actually moves through your business, inspect the state of your data, and map every candidate use case against effort, risk and payback.
A ranked shortlist, not a list. Each opportunity is scored on business value, data readiness, technical feasibility and time to first result — so the sequence is defensible to a CFO, not just interesting to engineers.
For each candidate: is this a solved problem you should buy, a configuration problem you should assemble, or a genuine build? We have shipped in all three modes and have no incentive to push you toward the expensive one.
Independent review of an AI system you already have or are about to commission — retrieval quality, evaluation coverage, failure modes, cost per transaction, security boundaries, and whether the design will survive its second year.
Most AI ambitions collide with data reality. We assess what you hold, how it is structured, where the gaps and duplicates are, and what has to be true before a retrieval or extraction system can be trusted.
Ongoing senior technical direction for teams building AI without a specialist in the room: architecture decisions, vendor selection, hiring input, evaluation strategy and governance.
You own every deliverable outright. You can take the roadmap to any builder — including not us. That is the point of paying for independent advice.
You describe the problem. We tell you honestly whether AI is the right tool, roughly what it would take, and whether we are the right people. Sometimes the answer is that you do not need us.
We agree what is in and out of the assessment, who we need to talk to, and what we need access to. You get a fixed price before anything starts. No hourly meter, no scope creep.
Interviews with the people doing the work, a walk through your systems and data, and technical validation of the candidate use cases. We prototype the risky assumptions rather than guessing at them.
A written report and a working session with your team. If a build makes sense, you get a costed plan for it. If it does not, you get the reasoning and the alternative.
Assessments are always fixed fee. We will not put you on an hourly meter for work whose scope we defined ourselves.
Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed end date. The standard first engagement and the cleanest way to work with us for the first time.
Fixed fee · 2–4 weeks · scoped to complexity
A shorter, focused review of an existing system or an incoming vendor proposal, with a written verdict and recommendations.
Fixed fee · 1–2 weeks · scoped to complexity
A recurring commitment of senior technical direction — architecture calls, reviews, vendor and hiring input — for teams that need the judgment but not the headcount.
Monthly retainer · minimum 3 months
Systems we have built that touch this kind of problem.
NextiaTax — our own product
A bookkeeping platform for Canadian small business, with AI extraction, a grounded assistant and native mobile apps. Built, shipped and operated by us.
NextiaDriveOps — our own product
A bilingual, multi-tenant operations platform for Canadian driving schools: constraint-based scheduling, learner records, automated messaging, billing and certificates.
Then the assessment succeeded. You have spent a few weeks instead of a few quarters finding out, and you have a written reason you can take to your board. We would rather deliver that than build something you will switch off in a year.
No, and the roadmap is deliberately written so you do not have to. You own it, it names technologies rather than proprietary magic, and it is detailed enough for another firm to quote against. Plenty of clients do exactly that.
Less than you expect. Most of the assessment is interviews, process tracing and schema-level inspection. Where we do need to see real data, we work under an NDA and inside your environment wherever possible.
Yes, and it usually goes better that way. Your team knows your systems; we bring the AI-specific judgment. We are happy to be the technical counterpart in their architecture discussions rather than a parallel track.
That is the most common case. You do not need a data team, an ML platform, or a strategy document to start. You need a real operational problem and somebody willing to tell you the truth about it.
Start here
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch. You describe the problem; we tell you honestly whether AI is the right tool, roughly what it would take, and whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so.
We reply within one business day. English or French.