A Plan You Can Defend to Your Board, and Systems Your Team Uses Every Day
Four ways to work together, from first assessment to running systems. Each engagement is scoped, has a clear deliverable, and starts from where your company stands, which is why every engagement begins with the assessment.
Dan Cumberland
Founder
AI Implementation Built Around Your Company
Pick the engagement that fits where you are right now.
Your team's hours are going to proposals, reporting, coordination, and client communications: work that AI handles well once someone designs the workflow, builds the system, and trains the people. We design the workflow, build the system, and train your people, and you keep everything we build.
Dan Cumberland
Founder
Available Services
AI Training
Hands-on sessions built around your team's real work.
AI Workflows
Your most painful workflow, rebuilt around AI and yours to keep.
AI implementation consulting →AI Advisory
A thinking partner who's done this before.
Four Places Firms Lose Time and Money With AI
Your team is spending hours on work AI could handle in minutes. These are the four places we see it most often.
AI Tool Sprawl
Your team signed up for six AI tools and none of them talk to each other. People experiment on personal accounts, the wins stay isolated to individuals, and nobody can say what any of it returns.
Leadership as Bottleneck
Every AI decision routes through the same two or three people, and they already have full-time jobs. Questions pile up, pilots stall, and the people who want to move wait for answers.
At a $10M company, every hour a leader spends sorting out AI tools is an hour not spent on strategy worth multiples more.
No AI Strategy
They buy licenses for everyone, sometimes training too, and six months later the team is still doing the same work the same way.
95% of companies see no measurable return from AI. The 5% who do tend to start with one workflow, redesign it with AI in it, and measure the result before buying more. That is the plan we build with you.1
Growing Pains
You have more work than your team has hours for. Hiring is slow and expensive, and your best people already spend big parts of their week on documentation and coordination that AI handles well.
AEC firms capture 20-30% more billable hours through workflow automation. Multiplied by your billing rates, that is a large number for most mid-market firms.2
Choose Your AI Implementation Path
| AI Roadmapping | AI Training | AI Workflows | AI Advisory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What You Get | Stakeholder interviews, a Pacemark score across six dimensions, a prioritized opportunity map, and a phased plan with owners and expected returns: the document you take to your board. | Working sessions where your team does the work with AI in the room: prompt patterns, review habits, and workflows they use the next morning. | Your highest-value workflow rebuilt around AI: designed, built, tested on your real data, documented, and handed over. You keep it. | Scheduled working calls, async access between them, and a partner who pressure-tests decisions before they get expensive. |
| Timeline | 4-6 weeks | 1-2 day sessions | 8-16 weeks | Ongoing |
| Best For | "Where do we even start?" | "Our team needs to get on the same page" | "We need AI in our actual workflows" | "We need a long-term strategic partner" |
How an Engagement Runs
Three steps from the first call to systems your team uses every day.
1
Strategy Call
A free 30 minutes. We look at where you stand (your assessment result if you have one, your situation if you don't) and discuss a proposed first move.
2
Assessment + Roadmap
We interview your team, score the six dimensions, and deliver the prioritized plan: proposed first move, owners, estimated costs and potential returns.
3
Build + Train
We build the systems with your team and train the people who will run them. You keep everything we build.
Client Results
Clients get hours back every week and turn multi-day projects into same-day work. Research shows strategic AI users recover up to 9 hours a week per person; for a 20-person firm at 50 weeks and $150 an hour, that is about $1.35M a year in modeled capacity.3
"They talked with almost a third of the firm before recommending anything, then handed us a clear, prioritized plan: what to do first, what to do later."
Larry Rupp, PE
President & CEO, Keller Associates
Challenge
250-person engineering firm, 12 offices, board asking for an AI strategy
Result
Firm-wide assessment → prioritized 90-day roadmap
A plan the CEO presented to every shareholder-owner.
"He raised our awareness of what's coming, pushed us to think hard about using AI responsibly, and worked with our team to build a practical roadmap for putting it to work."
James Bledsoe, PE
Board Chair, Keller Associates
Challenge
Board-level AI strategy for a 250-person firm
Result
A practical, responsible-adoption roadmap
"Dan's AI infrastructure is changing everything for our agency— it's the foundation taking us from seven to eight figures."
Amanda Northcutt
Founder & CEO, Level Up Creators
Challenge
Scaling from seven to eight figures without ballooning headcount.
Result
AI infrastructure built as the foundation for that growth
"I completed a complex data report in two hours— work that used to swallow up two full days."
Daniel Hatke
Ecomm Owner
Challenge
Complex data reports eating two full days each
Result
The same report finished in two hours
"As an outside board member, I've sat through a lot of presentations. Dan's was engaging and educational… there was a way for every person in the room to take part."
Julie Shiflett
Outside Board Member · Founder, Northwest CFO
Challenge
Presenting AI to a skeptical owner group
Result
Every owner in the room engaged
"[Dan] has an ability to deliver fresh insights with stunning clarity... Dan's ability to communicate how to treat AI as a co-intelligence dramatically improved, particularly my document writing, later that day."
Nick Cox
Director of Software Engineering, Smartsheet
Challenge
Getting more from AI than quick answers
Result
Sharper insights and writing the same day
About Dan
I've sat across the table from engineering teams, construction leaders, consultancies, and in-house departments trying to make AI real. The pattern is always the same: smart people, real interest, no shared picture of where they stand. That's the first thing we fix.
Pacemark, the AI maturity model behind every engagement, is built from published research on more than 400 named firms and organizations (evidence and limitations).
Why trust me?
- Hands-on implementation inside engineering and construction firms, and we're ACEC members
- A documented method: Pacemark, the maturity model behind every engagement
- Featured in Inc., Entrepreneur, and Fast Company
Free Guide
Train AI on Your Firm's Expertise
The system our clients use to train AI on their firm's processes and expertise. Proposals, reports, and documentation your team can produce in minutes, without starting from scratch every time.
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