ai department retainer
Good AI engineers are scarce, expensive, and mostly don't want to work at a 40-person logistics firm. Fine. We'll be your AI department instead.
why a retainer
One-off automation decays. Tools change, edge cases pile up, the person who understood it leaves, and six months later your team is quietly working around the thing that was supposed to save them time.
The retainer exists so that never happens: a senior team accountable for the hours your company gets back — building the next automation while running the last one.
| In-house AI hire | agentclaw retainer | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Six figures a year before tooling | Scoped to your budget, starts at $5K/mo |
| Time to first result | Months of hiring, then onboarding | First automation ships in weeks |
| Coverage | One person's skill set | A bench: engineering, ops, prompting, training |
| Key-person risk | They leave, the knowledge leaves | Documented systems you own either way |
If you can hire a great AI lead, genuinely — do it. Most companies our size of client can't, which is why this exists.
the operating rhythm
01
The audit produces the ranked roadmap: every automation worth building in your business, ordered by hours returned per dollar.
02
Agents and automations go live in priority order. You see what shipped, what it's handling, and what's next — every month, in plain language.
03
Each automation feeds the next: cleaner data, connected tools, a team that trusts the systems. Year two looks nothing like month one.
Retainers start at $5,000/month, scoped by how much you want built and run. Exact numbers come out of the free audit — in writing, before you commit.
We scope terms on the audit call, because it depends on what we're building first. You'll have everything in writing before anything starts — no auto-renewing fine print.
You do. Documentation and handover are part of the deal, not an exit fee. If we ever part ways, your systems keep running and your team knows how they work.
Every automation ships with a simple measure: what it handles, what it escalates, and the hours it returns. If a thing isn't earning its keep, we say so and kill it.
The audit produces the ranked automation roadmap the retainer would execute. Take it and run it yourself, or have us do it — either way you'll know what AI is worth in your business.
We take on companies ready to invest $5,000+/month. Not there yet? Our free resources are genuinely free.