Standalone · $1,495
Start with an audit
A one-week read on your stack: what to keep, what to build, what to kill. Complete on its own, whether or not we ever build a thing.
For operators who know AI matters but are drowning in products that all promise it. Watershed becomes your standing Chief AI Officer: cutting through the noise, building what actually earns its place, and keeping everything you own running. One partner, a fraction of a full-time hire, and you decide every ninety days whether it is worth it.
Every workflow you run is suddenly crowded with AI products, each one promising to change your business. Most of it is noise. The hard part is not finding AI, it is knowing which few tools are worth keeping, wiring them into something that works together, and skipping the learning curve on fifty products you will never adopt. We cut through the mess and build you one efficient, powerful ecosystem instead of a drawer full of half-used subscriptions. At your size you cannot yet justify a full-time AI executive to do that. This is the gap it fills.
Your operation already runs on a stack of tools, and nobody's actual job is to think about AI across all of it.
AI is already reshaping how your industry works, and you have no time to learn to build it yourself.
You want senior judgment about what to actually do, not another vendor selling you a subscription to rent.
Whatever we build is yours outright. No black box, no platform you can never leave.
Here is the distinction that matters. The tools we build for you are plain software you own, with no AI running inside them. That keeps them cheap to run, predictable, and free of surprises. They are built to work alongside AI tools rather than bury AI inside themselves.
The CAIO engagement is where the real AI lives. We decide where AI earns its place and where it does not. We pick the right tools and models for each job, build the workflows around them, and set the guardrails that keep you secure and compliant. The owned tools and the AI stack work together, each doing what it does best. Knowing where AI belongs, and where it doesn't, is the job.
A sample of the problems a CAIO engagement takes off your plate. We do not assume we already know your pain. Yours gets drawn from your own operation in the first two weeks, and the work is scoped to that, not to our guesses. It all pulls in one direction: getting the operation out of one or two people's heads and into documented systems and tools the business owns, so the standard holds whether or not any single person is in the room.
The engagement runs on a predictable cadence. You always know what you are getting and what it is doing for you.
We measure where your time actually goes, using walkthroughs, screen recordings of your real processes, your time-tracking data, and an audit of your SOP library, with our own onboarding wizard timing each process step by step. Then we analyze it, build the strategic plan, find the single biggest win, and start there. Everything after is measured against that first number, so the value is never a matter of opinion.
We maintain everything already built, ship improvements and small builds inside scope, and meet with you up to three times. Time saved gets tracked the way it was earned, not assumed. See "How we measure it" below. You get one clear readout: hours saved, dollars recovered, what is next.
A written read on where AI is heading in your specific industry and what it means for your strategy. What to build, what to buy, and what to retire before it costs you.
Continue, scale, or stop. No lock-in. The renewal is earned on the numbers, not buried in a contract.
The monthly fee covers strategy and the ongoing health of everything you own. Big new builds are quoted on their own, so the fee never quietly inflates.
We never pad the monthly fee with builds you did not ask for, and we never bury a major build inside it. You always see the line.
A tool that takes five minutes to run but three hours to check did not save you anything. So we track time in two pieces, not one, and we log it the same way every cycle.
Your monthly readout shows baseline, doing time, verifying time, and fix time side by side. The hours-saved figure is what's left after all of it, never the doing time alone.
We set the baseline in the first two weeks and report against it every month: doing time, verifying time, fix time, and what's left over. If the number is there, you see it. If it is not, you see that too, and you can walk at the next ninety-day mark with everything we built still yours.
You are never paying into a black box and hoping. You are watching a number you agreed to, measured the same honest way every cycle.
We grade every build on a six-class scale, the way a river is rated for difficulty. The higher the class, the more complexity and risk it carries. Class VI is the line we do not cross, and saying so up front is part of the job.
We do not build unattended AI that makes consequential decisions on its own. We do not build systems that decide anyone's job, housing, credit, or healthcare. We do not touch raw financial data or trust accounting, and we do not build anything we would not be comfortable owning ourselves. If a request crosses that line, we tell you why and stop. A CAIO who will build anything is not protecting you.
One relationship instead of a team to manage. Ninety-day cycles, no lock-in, and you own everything we build.
The audit and the sprint are complete, standalone engagements, not CAIO onboarding. Run one, keep everything it produces, and walk away square. If you later decide the seat is worth it, a portion of what you paid credits toward your first CAIO month.
A one-week read on your stack: what to keep, what to build, what to kill. Complete on its own, whether or not we ever build a thing.
One tool built in a week, yours to keep regardless of what comes next. Includes the same ranked analysis the audit delivers.
The full standing engagement from day one. Right if you already know the role needs to exist and don't need a ramp to prove it.