An AI consultant in Cleveland who builds what he recommends

Cleveland has a growing list of AI consulting firms, AI agencies, and solo AI consultants, and the terms get used so loosely that most owners can't tell them apart. An AI agency usually builds you one project, like a chatbot or a dashboard, then moves to the next client. A larger AI consulting firm often sends a team to interview your staff and hands over a slide deck with a roadmap drawn by someone who will never touch your code.

I work as one person who does both halves of that job. I spend the first weeks finding which of your workflows waste the most hours, the same discovery work a consulting firm sells. Then I build the fix myself, the same build work an agency sells. Since I wrote the plan, nothing gets lost in a handoff.

That setup fits a Cleveland business with one office and a lean staff better than either extreme does. You get a straight answer about what artificial intelligence can do for your specific workflow, and a working tool, from the same phone number.

Cleveland still runs on manufacturing, and machine learning earns its keep fastest in a shop's front office: sorting incoming quote requests by urgency, pulling specs out of a customer's PDF, and flagging a price that's way under cost before it goes out the door. Generative AI writes the first draft of that quote email, and a person reads it before it sends.

Healthcare groups around University Circle and the suburbs use AI differently. The win there is usually administrative: intake forms that fill themselves from a scanned insurance card, appointment reminders that cut down on no-shows, and call summaries that give a nurse back a few minutes after every visit.

Financial services and professional firms downtown get more from analytics than from drafted text. AI can read a stack of contracts and pull out every renewal date, or flag a number in a spreadsheet that doesn't match last month. A simple predictive model can look at payment history and point out the clients who usually pay late, so someone calls them before the invoice goes past due.

Every engagement starts with the Tech Audit: two weeks, one flat price, a ranked list of the AI wins worth chasing first, and a one-year plan for the rest. I sit with your team, watch where the day actually goes, and rank each idea by how fast it pays for itself. Practical AI goes to the top of the list. The flashy ideas can wait.

After that, I build. Each tool gets wired into what your team already uses (your email, your customer list, your website) instead of forcing everyone onto a new platform. Say someone spends every Friday afternoon copying numbers between spreadsheets. Once we automate that workflow, the report lands in your inbox before you've poured coffee.

Every build keeps a person in the loop for anything a customer sees. AI drafts the quote, the reminder, or the reply. A staff member reads it first. That rule never bends, no matter how good the AI tools get.

I work with companies across Greater Cleveland: Lakewood, Westlake, Parma, Strongsville, Solon, Beachwood, and out toward Mentor and Medina. The first walkthrough happens at your office, so I can see the actual paper pile or phone queue before suggesting anything. After that, most of the work runs over video, with a standing weekly call and short written updates. You always know what shipped and what's still in progress.

Open up most AI projects and you'll find a software development job inside. Say a shop wants its quoting tool to read customer PDFs. A custom AI tool like that is really custom software development: hooking an AI agent up to the inbox, the ERP, and the price sheet so the draft quote shows real numbers. I price AI solutions the same way I price a website build, with the cost up front and an honest guess at the hours it saves each week.

Sometimes the fix is a phone app or a web page. A field tech snaps a photo of a finished job, and the app drafts the service report before he's back in the truck. That's mobile app development with one AI step inside. On the web development side, your contact form can read what a customer typed (that's natural language processing), answer the easy questions, and send the hard ones to a person on your team.

Data science sounds big. For a 30-person company it usually means one thing: stop exporting spreadsheets by hand. I set up an AI-powered business intelligence dashboard that pulls from your accounting, sales, and shop systems every night. Your ops manager checks real numbers each morning, and data analysis that used to wait for the end of the quarter shows up while you can still act on it.

Cybersecurity comes with every build. Each person logs in with their own account, access ends the day someone leaves, and a lost laptop can't open your files. As your team grows, the same setup keeps scaling without a rebuild.