AI integration that actually ships, not another vendor pitch
AI Automation at $3,000 a month. Senior engineer, vendor-neutral. OpenAI and Claude wired into internal APIs. Monthly retainer, cancel anytime.
Who this is for
Scaleup ops executive with a 30+ ops team and growing unit-economics pressure.
The pain today
- Ops cost per customer is growing faster than revenue.
- New AI vendors pitch every week; none deliver to the integration level needed.
- Internal engineering cannot spare cycles for ops AI work.
- Existing Zapier and no-code tools break at current scale.
The outcome you get
- AI integrations with internal APIs, not screen scraping.
- Measurable unit economics improvement across quarters.
- Vendor consolidation: 2-3 tools retired per quarter.
- A senior engineer embedded in the stack, not a vendor pitching.
Scaleup unit-economics pressure
Post-PMF scaleups live under unit economics pressure. The board expects gross margin to widen as the team scales. Ops cost per customer is the lever most boards press first. The levers inside ops cost per customer are automation (fewer hours per customer) and tooling (fewer vendors per workflow). AI automation at $3,000 a month usually retires $5,000-$15,000 a month in vendor costs and recovers 20-30 percent of ops hours inside two quarters. The retainer pays itself back many times over. I report the metric every month so the COO has a CFO-readable story.
Vendor consolidation pattern
A 30+ ops team usually has 15-25 SaaS tools, with 5-8 overlapping on automation. Zapier plus Make plus three vertical-specific tools plus a custom Airtable setup. Each has its own bill, its own maintenance, its own failure mode. I audit the stack in month one and recommend consolidation: which tools to keep, which to replace with internal automations, which to retire. The savings over a year are typically $50,000-$150,000 in subscription costs plus uncounted ops time.
Integrating Claude and OpenAI with internal APIs
Scaleup automation needs real integrations. I write the integration layer in Node or Python, wire it to the internal API (HubSpot, Salesforce, internal apps), and then call Claude or OpenAI from the integration layer. Every subsequent automation builds on the layer, compounding throughput. The layer is a standard pattern: auth, rate limiting, error handling, logging, observability. Once the layer exists, new automations ship in days instead of weeks. This pattern scaled Cuez's API by 10x.
Phased rollout and change management
Rolling AI into a 30+ person ops team is a change management exercise. I roll each automation through three phases: shadow (AI runs, no decisions), assist (AI drafts, human approves), automation (AI decides, sample audit). Each phase lasts 2-4 weeks. The team ramps confidence without the 'AI is replacing my job' reaction. By automation phase the team has moved up the stack to higher-leverage work. The VP of Ops gets a team that is larger and more capable in effective terms.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub — a faster, more scalable successor — handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- Can you work alongside our internal AI team?
- Yes. I take on projects they lack bandwidth for and integrate with their standards. Collaboration, not competition.
- What's your approach to data privacy at scale?
- Explicit data boundaries per automation. Self-hosted models for sensitive data. BAA-compliant providers for HIPAA. Audit trails end to end.
- Can you replace multiple vendor tools at once?
- In sequence, not all at once. Each replacement ships, proves for 30 days, then the next.
- Do you work with our SSO and RBAC?
- Yes. Every automation respects existing access controls. I do not create shadow data flows.
- Typical engagement length at scaleup?
- 9-18 months. Most scaleups run the retainer to ship 10-15 automations and consolidate 3-5 vendors, then scale down to maintenance.
Ready to start?
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