Business Operations

An accounts payable team at a professional services firm hired a consultant to automate invoice processing. The scope looked clean: structured PDFs, a consistent vendor list, a known ERP destination. Discovery took one week. The exception inventory surfaced forty-three vendor formats instead of the expected twelve, and one vendor in the top ten by volume formatted line items across two rows in their PDF rather than one. That single variance meant the parser split a combined line into two separate charges and calculated a different total on every invoice that vendor sent. ...

Most AI consulting firms cannot implement. Not because they lack smart people, but because their business model was never designed for it. They were built for advisory: partners who sell, analysts who synthesize, decks that present. Implementation requires a fundamentally different operating model: engineers who build, tested environments, sprint cadences, and production deployments. The majority of firms on any shortlist have the first and not the second, and their proposals are written to obscure that distinction. ...