AI consulting for businesses
that run on real work.
Skilak Consulting provides AI consulting and automation for small and mid-sized businesses: assistants that answer questions over your own documents, agents that handle intake and scheduling, and automations that take repetitive work off your team. Built by senior engineers, with the guardrails and evaluation to run in production.
Process first, not technology first. We automate the workflow you actually have — and tell you plainly when AI isn't the right tool.
What AI automation actually fixes
The wins aren't futuristic — they're the hours your team loses every week to repetitive knowledge work. These are the patterns we build most:
Answering the same questions all day
An assistant grounded in your own documents — policies, manuals, contracts — that answers staff and customer questions with citations, so your experts stop being a help desk.
Manual intake & scheduling
Voice and chat agents that take intake calls, qualify leads, and book appointments directly into your calendar and CRM — around the clock.
Re-typing data between systems
Automations that read invoices, forms, and emails, extract what matters, and push it into your accounting, CRM, or job-management system.
Reports nobody has time to build
Scheduled summaries of operational data — what happened, what changed, what needs attention — delivered to your inbox instead of assembled by hand.
When should you hire an AI consultant?
Hire an AI consultant when a repetitive, rule-following workflow consumes real staff hours and off-the-shelf tools haven't stuck. If you can explain a task to a new hire in an afternoon, we can usually automate most of it — and measure the hours it gives back.
You don't need a data science team, clean data, or an "AI strategy" to start. You need one well-chosen workflow, a fixed-price pilot, and honest measurement. That's the engagement we run.
And if your documents are too sensitive for cloud AI — patient records, defense work, client files — the same capability runs entirely inside your network with private AI deployment or the Skilak Spool on-premises AI appliance.
How we work
Free strategy call
We map where hours actually go in your operation and identify the two or three automations with real payback — process first, not technology first.
Paid pilot, fixed price
A small, production-quality pilot on your real data with clear success criteria — working software, not a slide deck.
Production & guardrails
We harden the pilot with evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails, wire it into your systems, and train your team.
Measure & extend
We track hours saved and error rates against the baseline, then extend what works — and retire what doesn't.
What AI consulting costs
Straight answers, because guessing helps no one: a readiness assessment starts around $2,000–$5,000, fixed-price pilots typically run $10,000–$30,000, and production automations $30,000–$150,000 depending on scope. Most clients see payback within 4–8 months in recovered staff hours. Every price is fixed and in writing before we start.
Get a fixed quote →Frequently asked questions
What does AI consulting cost for a small business?
An AI readiness assessment starts around $2,000–$5,000. Fixed-price pilots typically run $10,000–$30,000, and full production automations $30,000–$150,000 depending on scope. Most clients see payback within 4–8 months. Every engagement starts with a free strategy call and a written quote.
When should a business hire an AI automation consultant?
When repetitive knowledge work — intake, data entry, document lookup, reporting — consumes staff hours you could redeploy, and off-the-shelf tools haven't stuck. If a task follows rules you can explain to a new hire, it's usually automatable.
Which AI models and platforms do you work with?
OpenAI and Anthropic Claude for cloud deployments, plus local open-weight models for on-premises work. We're vendor-neutral: the model is an implementation detail, and we design so you can switch providers without rebuilding.
What is RAG, and do we need it?
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) grounds an AI assistant in your own documents so it answers from your content — with citations — instead of guessing. If your team spends time digging answers out of PDFs, manuals, or old emails, RAG implementation is usually the highest-value first project.
What if our data can't go to a cloud AI service?
Then we deploy AI inside your own network. Our private AI deployment service and the Skilak Spool appliance run local models and document search entirely on your hardware — designed to operate within CMMC, HIPAA, or ITAR programs.
How do you keep AI from making things up?
Evaluation and guardrails are part of every build: grounded retrieval with citations, output validation, human-in-the-loop steps where stakes are high, and an evaluation suite that measures accuracy on your real cases before and after every change.
Do you serve St. Louis businesses on-site?
Yes. We're based in St. Charles and work on-site across the St. Louis metro — and remotely with clients nationwide. Local means we can walk your floor, watch the actual workflow, and automate what really happens rather than what the org chart says.
Let's build something real.
Have a project, a legacy system that needs attention, or a contract to discuss? We respond within one business day.