The experienced technical voice in the room, for the founder without one, the mid-market team facing a platform decision, or the board that needs the AI conversation translated into something it can act on.
What we do
Most strategy decks die on contact with the org. The reason is usually the same: the person who wrote it has never actually built the thing. We have. Privian's advisory work starts from the assumption that whatever you decide, somebody has to build it, and the strategy has to be honest about what that's going to cost in time, people, and tradeoffs.
We've been the SE across nearly every Fortune 100. We've also stood up the back office for a five-person nonprofit. That range is the point. The same patterns apply at both scales, and the same gut checks apply to both decisions.
A fixed-scope diagnostic engagement. Two to four weeks. Fixed price. You get a written report.
We audit four things: your data (where it is, what shape it's in, what you can legally use), your infrastructure (what you have, what you'd need to add, what it'll cost), your team (who could build this, who'd need to learn what), and your goals (what you're actually trying to accomplish, beneath the AI framing).
The deliverable is a playbook: where to start, what to build first, what to avoid, what to outsource, what to keep in-house, and what success would look like in 90 days.
It's the most common way new engagements begin. At the end of it, you either have a clear path forward you can run yourself, or a defined next engagement we'd take on together. Either way, you're not paying for ambiguity.
The standing engagement. Four to sixteen hours a week, ongoing, six to twelve month minimum. We're in your standups, your architecture reviews, your investor conversations, your hiring loops. We don't replace your team. We make the call when the call has to be made by someone who's seen this movie before.
Scoped advisory engagements for specific decisions: technical due diligence on an acquisition, platform evaluation, board prep for a major investment, post-mortem on something that went sideways.
Related writing
The promotion from execute-with-confirmation to bounded autonomy is the steepest cliff in the autonomy ladder. What gates need to be in place before the promotion is safe.
AIDifferent cost profiles, different SLAs. How to think about an AI product as a system, not a model call.
AICustomer-facing belongs in the cloud. Training, batch, and eval belong on the desk. Why running both costs less and works better.
The AI Readiness Assessment is the most common way new engagements begin. Two to four weeks. Fixed price. A written playbook at the end.
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