Stop using AI. Start deploying it.

Small practice. Confidential by obligation. No IT department.

Accounting and tax. Law. Dental. Surveyors, brokers, vets, architects, consultants — anyone whose work product is somebody else's private business.

Check me before you contact me.

Everything I do is written out at Learn: the operating system, the vault, the models, the hardware it takes, how it is tested, and what it costs to run. Free. No paywall, no course, no signup to read it.

It is written properly enough that you might read it, hand it to whoever looks after your computers, and build the thing yourself. That is what it is for. If you do that and it works, you owe me nothing and you should not have paid me.

The blog is the same habit pointed at the failures. It is where you will find “The install command in its own README does not work” and “The model was fine. My ruler was broken ten times.” I would rather you read those first.

Somebody has to be in the room with it.

If the machine lives in your building, then on the day it stops working somebody has to stand next to it. That is the part of this that no remote arrangement covers, and it is why I only take work I can drive to.

How your files actually leave

For most businesses that is a fine trade. For a firm holding records that belong to someone else, it is not — and it is rarely the first thing anybody mentions.

Nobody in your office decides to put a client file into a public AI service.

Someone has a long document and not much time. They paste in the part that needs summarising. It works, and it saves them the afternoon, so they do it again on Thursday. Then it is just how that task gets done.

No alert arrives, and nothing in your building records it.

The first time you find out is when somebody asks you, in writing, whether it happened.

On a system that stays in your building, something does record it.

You can see what went in, and what was asked. Every file is kept. Every file is logged — the name, the size, the time, and a fingerprint of the file itself, so you can tell later whether it is still the same one. What was asked of it is recorded the same way.

That is not a way to watch your staff, and I would not build you one. It is the visibility you already have over the firm's email, extended to the one thing it does not currently cover — and it works better when everyone knows it is there. People route around a system they are suspicious of, and the thing they go back to is the one you cannot see at all.

That is not a staff problem. It is what happens when the only AI available to them is one that requires the file to leave.

You do not have to become the person who runs the AI. You only have to say what you want.

The last sentence you say about a piece of work is the last time you hold it — pick the field closest to yours.

One choice sits underneath all of these. On hardware you own, the file does not leave it. The quicker way sends it to somebody else's model. Either way you can say which, in one sentence, to whoever asks.

Nobody in your office has to become the person who runs the AI — that part is mine.

What keeps your files yours

1. The model, on hardware you own, on your terms

   You run your own model, on a machine that belongs to you, on terms you set rather than terms you accept. Not an account with a company you have never met. What it reads does not go anywhere. I run one that way myself, on my own card.

2. You decide who it will listen to

   Speaker verification, so it checks the voice belongs to the person it thinks it does before it does anything at all. Speech in and speech out, so using it does not mean sitting at a keyboard with both hands free.

3. A login that actually holds

   Yours gets tested with the wrong credential, not the right one. A login only ever tried by the person who owns it has not been tested — it has been used.

4. You find out from the system, not from somebody asking

   Every system tells you things about itself — what is running, who has access, what was kept. A separate checker compares every one of those claims against what is measurably true and reports where they disagree. It runs against me too. It has caught me.

Prompts are the top inch of that. They are the part almost everyone sells, because they are the only part that does not require owning the rest.

What I will not tell you

The cheapest thing to check about anyone selling AI is what they refuse to do. Here is mine, in advance, so you can hold me to it later.

I will not tell you it is compliant. That determination belongs to your regulator, your insurer or your lawyer, and it is about your firm rather than my software. What I can tell you is where the data physically sits, who can reach it, and what is written down when they do — which is what those people are going to ask you anyway. Anyone using the word "compliant" about a system they built for you is describing a decision that was never theirs to make.

I will not tell you it does not make things up. It does. Every system I build starts from that assumption, so the design question is never whether it will be wrong. It is what it is permitted to do on the occasion that it is.

I will not tell you it replaces anybody. I will not put a number on your staff, because I do not know them and any figure I gave you would be a sales tactic wearing arithmetic.

I will not quote you a price before I have costed it. These systems have a real bill underneath them — hardware, electricity, or usage metered by the minute. A number given before that arithmetic is a guess, and a guess becomes the contract.

I will not tell you that you need this. Plenty of firms your size do not. If I look and the honest answer is that what you have is fine, that is the answer you will get, in writing, and you will owe me nothing for it.

Four ways to do this. One of them does not involve me.

The only difference between them is how much of it I do. Prices are below rather than behind a phone call. You should be able to work out whether you can afford me without talking to me first.

Your machine, your account. I am not involved.

Free. The instructions are on this site — install the operating system, install the model, point it at your own files, and finish with something running on a machine you own. Nothing to sign up for, nothing owed, and I never see your files or your name. It is not a trial of anything. I write it because people who use it tell other people, and that is the entire return I am after.

I look at what you have, and tell you what to do about it.

$2,500, fixed. I look at what you actually have — the machines, the files, who touches what — and write you an answer: what could run on hardware you own, what should not, and what it would take. Yours to keep and act on, with me or without me. The conversation at the bottom of this page is free and stays free; this is the version where I come and look properly. If you want me on hand afterwards, you buy days rather than a monthly retainer, so there is never a month where you pay me for not needing me.

I come to your office and do it with you.

$3,500 a day. We set it up together, at your pace, and I will do the keystrokes if you would rather watch than type. This is the most expensive thing I sell and it should be — it is a whole day, not seven billable hours, and I cannot do anything else with it. That price is within about an hour of The Woodlands; further out, we work travel out before either of us picks a date.

I run it, and you use it over the web.

From $750 a month. Some firms are never going to buy a machine, and this is for them — I run it, keep your part of it walled off from every other client's, and you reach it from wherever you work. Training your staff is separate and charged by the hour, because how much of it anybody needs is not something I can guess in advance.

This is the one place on this page where the hardware is not yours, and I would rather say so than have you notice. It is not your machine. It is your space on mine, and I will tell you which machine, where it physically sits, and who can reach it. That is custody with an address on it — a real answer to the question your insurer is going to ask, and still not the same as owning the box. If owning the box is the point for you, it is one of the other three.

Those are the prices of my time and my hosting, and I know them. What your system costs is a different question, and I still will not answer that one before I have costed it.

You hire one person. Someone else always checks the work.

Whichever of those you pick, you deal with me, and I answer for all of it. I direct twenty AI specialists. They are agents rather than employees and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Each has one job and one thing it refuses to do, and nothing any of them produces reaches you unchecked.

What that buys you is not speed.

It is that the one who builds a thing is never the one who checks it, and the one who checks it is rewarded for finding it broken. The one who reviews the code cannot change the code. The one who tests logins tests them with the wrong password. The one who reads the numbers is not allowed to run the thing being measured.

Those are separate on purpose. The separation is the product. Your system gets built the same way.

Who this is not for

Saying this plainly is the only thing that makes the rest of the page believable.

What do you actually want to do?

Three honest answers, and one of them costs nothing and does not involve me.

Find out what AI could actually save you

Tell me what your firm does. That is enough to start.

I will tell you where your files are going, what is being kept, and what could run on hardware you own instead. No charge for that, and nothing owed afterwards.

If the answer is that you are fine as you are, that is what you will hear.