Who do you work with as an AI automation consultant?

Operations-heavy teams of roughly 10–50 people: agencies, professional services firms, and growing startups. The common thread is a team losing real hours every week to repetitive work that a system could handle.

Why work with an independent AI automation consultant over an agency?

With an agency, you pitch a senior partner and get handed off to junior contractors learning on your dime. With me, the person who scopes the architecture is the person who writes the code and puts it into production. You get faster turnaround, no communication telephone games, and direct accountability.

What tools and platforms do you use for workflow automation?

Mostly n8n for deterministic workflow pipelines, open source LLM agent frameworks for reasoning tasks, and direct REST APIs for your stack (CRMs, Slack, databases). I prefer open, self-hostable tools over proprietary black boxes so you retain full ownership of your data and logic.

How long does an automation project take?

A single automation is usually one to two weeks. A connected system across a few tools is more like three to four. Scope is agreed before any work starts.

Do you work hourly or fixed price?

Fixed-scope, fixed-price only. No hourly billing. We agree what's being built and what it costs, then I build it.

What tools do you use to build automations?

Usually n8n for workflow automation, APIs for system integration, and LLM-powered agents (often with RAG) where reasoning is needed. No custom software is built unless off-the-shelf tools can't do the job.

Do we own the automation you build?

Yes. When it's done, it's yours, running in your tools, on your accounts, with documentation so you or another developer can maintain it without me.

Field Notes

Writing on AI, automation, and shipping real things.

Build logs, strategy, and industry breakdowns. Specific over conceptual — written to be useful, not to fill a calendar.

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IndustrySeepientOpenAIGrokAI Agents

9 min readOctober 1, 2026

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