The pilot ran. Nothing changed.
The tools work. Choosing is the hard part.
The models get better every few weeks. Deciding where they belong in your business doesn't get easier: which workflows to rebuild, what to buy, what to build, and what quietly breaks when the model is wrong.
That takes someone who has shipped AI into production and cleaned up after it: one senior person your team can bring a hard question to, any week, and get a straight answer with the reasoning behind it.
What you get every month
The opportunity map
In month one I learn how your teams actually work and hand back a ranked list: where AI saves real time, what it costs to get there, and what it puts at risk. Expect most of the list to be things you decide not to do.
Working sessions
Scheduled time with your engineers, your leadership, or both, on whatever is live. Architecture reviews, build-or-buy calls, model selection, the agent design nobody is sure about.
Async access
Ask between sessions and get an answer from me, usually the same day. The questions that matter tend to show up on a Tuesday afternoon, not in the monthly meeting.
Vendor and tool calls
Copilot or Claude Code, which agent platform, whether that vendor's demo survives your data. I take no reseller margins or referral fees, so the answer isn't for sale.
Guardrails before scale
Where your data goes, which keys live where, what an agent is allowed to touch. The unglamorous controls that keep an AI feature from turning into an incident.
A path to building it
If the map says build, I can build it at a fixed price, scoped separately, in your repos. Or take the map to your own team. Either way, it's yours.
Two retainers, priced in public
Advisor
$5,000/ month
You have capable engineers. What you're short on is someone who has already made the expensive mistakes with these tools and can tell you which bets are worth making.
Every month:
- The opportunity map in month one, revisited as things change
- Two working sessions with engineering, leadership, or both
- Async access between sessions, answered by me, usually same day
- Vendor, model, and build-or-buy calls
Month one is the map. If it says you don't need a retainer, I'll tell you and we stop there.
Embedded
$9,000/ month
AI is going into what your customers touch, and a wrong architecture call costs you quarters, not sprints. This is the forward deployed engineer tier.
Everything in Advisor, plus:
- Weekly working sessions instead of twice a month
- Priority async access, in your Slack if you want me there
- Hands-on review in your repos: PRs, agent design, evals
- Pairing with your engineers on the hard paths
- Roadmap work with leadership on the next twelve months
Larger build work is quoted separately, at a fixed price, once we know what it is.
Need it built? SaaS MVPs and custom software are quoted at a fixed price. Need someone shipping inside your team? Forward deployed engineering.
How it works
The call
Thirty minutes, free. Tell me what your teams ship and what you've already tried. If I can't help, I'll say so and point you at someone who can.
Month one: the map
How your teams work today, where AI makes them faster, what it costs, and what it breaks. Ranked, with a recommendation.
The rhythm
Working sessions and async access, with the cadence set by what your team needs rather than what a contract says.
Month to month
Thirty days' notice either way, no termination fee. Every month is a decision you get to make again.
For / not for
Good fit
- You've tried AI and can't point to what it changed
- You have engineers, or a vendor, who can do the work once the direction is clear
- Leadership wants a straight answer, including "don't"
- AI is headed into the product and the architecture has to hold
Not a fit
- A strategy deck with no follow-through
- Someone to sign off on a decision that's already made
- A ten-person build team on day one
- Skipping the data and security basics to get to the fun part
Advice from someone who ships it
I'm Matt Wagner. I've built software professionally since 2008 and founded or co-founded eight products. I build and run them with Claude Code, MCP servers, and agents every day, which is the same stack I'll be advising you on.
The advice comes from running these tools in production, on my own products and on client work, every week.
No resale margins, no referral fees, no bench to keep busy. If the honest answer is a $20-a-month tool, that's the answer.
Matt has been an invaluable partner as a fractional CTO — leading complex CRM integrations, building custom programs that enhanced our operational efficiency, and contributing to cost-saving initiatives that positively impacted our bottom line.