Reclaim 30 percent of ops capacity without another headcount
AI Automation at $3,000 a month. Senior engineer wiring Claude and OpenAI into support, sales, finance, and data. One retainer, no agency markup.
Who this is for
Series A COO or head of ops managing a 15-40-person team where unit economics are tightening.
The pain today
- Ops cost per customer is creeping up faster than revenue.
- Every new ops hire is absorbed by manual workflow within a quarter.
- Vendor tools pitch AI but do not integrate with the internal API.
- The board is asking about AI leverage with no clean metric to show.
The outcome you get
- Three department-level automations live in the first 90 days.
- A clear ops cost per customer reduction trend inside two quarters.
- Integrations that use internal APIs, not brittle browser scripts.
- A quarterly AI ROI report the CFO can bring to the board.
Series A unit-economics pressure
Series A boards expect gross margin to move. The lever is either pricing or cost, and cost usually wins. Ops cost per customer is the line most boards press on first, because it tends to creep as the team scales. AI automation is the leverage play: three to five automations across support, sales ops, and finance usually recover 20-30 percent of ops hours in the first two quarters. The retainer at $3,000 a month is small relative to the ops payroll it protects. I track the metric every month and report it in a CFO-readable format.
Three highest-ROI AI automations by department
Support: ticket triage, draft responses, knowledge base updates from resolved tickets. Sales ops: lead enrichment, scoring, auto-routing to reps, pipeline hygiene. Finance: invoice extraction, expense categorization, month-end close prep. These nine automations (three per department) are the core I build for most Series A startups. They share data primitives, so building one speeds up the next. By month six the savings compound because the team has time to run the next cycle of improvements.
Change management with a 20-person team
Wiring AI into a 20-person team is a change-management problem as much as an engineering one. I roll out each automation in phases: shadow mode (AI runs alongside humans, no decisions), assist mode (AI drafts, human approves), automation mode (AI decides, human audits samples). Each phase lasts 2-4 weeks. The team ramps confidence without the 'AI is taking my job' reaction. By the time a workflow is fully automated, the team has moved up the stack.
Metrics and dashboards
Every Series A AI engagement gets a live dashboard: automations active, tasks processed per week, hours saved per workflow, error rate, cost per task. This is the CFO's tool for defending the retainer line item. It is also the COO's tool for spotting which workflows are saturating and which are ripe for the next expansion. I build the dashboard in week one and update it monthly.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
A prompt library that works with every AI tool
A home for your best AI prompts. Save them once, then use them in Claude, Cursor, or any AI tool you work with. No more copy-paste.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- Do you replace existing vendor tools?
- Sometimes. I audit the vendor stack in the first month and recommend keep, replace, or augment. Many Series A stacks have 2-3 tools doing overlapping work.
- Who owns the automations?
- You. Work Made for Hire. Code, prompts, data pipelines, and dashboards are yours from day one.
- Can you work with our SOC 2 or HIPAA posture?
- Yes. I use your OpenAI or Azure OpenAI accounts, respect your data classification, and for HIPAA I wire BAA-compliant providers or self-hosted models.
- How do you onboard with our internal engineering team?
- I follow the same engineering conventions as Applications Pro: GitHub, code review, staging and prod separation. Your engineers own the integration points they care about.
- Can we scale up or down the retainer?
- The retainer is single-tier at $3,000/mo. If the volume grows beyond my single-senior bandwidth, I help you hire or recommend additional engineers.
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