Kerning Consulting · AI Advisory & Build
Kerning works with founders, executives, and product teams to identify where AI creates durable value — then helps you build it. No roadmap theater. No generic automation playbooks. Just sharp scoping and precise execution from a team that has shipped AI products across financial services, legal, logistics, and SaaS.
5 questions · ~90 seconds · Personalized output · Free · No account required.
200+
Past AI implementations diagnosed
1–500
Employee company sweet spot
90 days
Typical time from scoping to first production deployment
Industries we've shipped AI in
"Kerning did something rare — they pushed back on our first brief, re-scoped the project around the actual bottleneck, and shipped something that worked. We're at 4× throughput on a workflow that used to require three full-time people."
What Kerning does
Most AI consulting falls into one of two failure modes: strategy firms that produce roadmaps and leave you to build, or dev shops that build what you ask for without telling you what you actually need. Kerning does neither.
We start every engagement with a diagnostic that identifies where AI creates real leverage in your specific context — not where AI is popular, and not where it's easiest to demonstrate. Then we build it, end-to-end, to a production standard that scales with your business.
Diagnose
Every Kerning engagement begins with structured discovery — a sharp look at your workflows, data, tooling, and team to identify where AI creates genuine leverage vs. where it creates complexity. We tell you what not to build as often as what to build.
Build
Kerning builds AI systems that run in your actual stack — connected to your data, integrated with your tools, and designed to be maintained by your team after we leave. We work in focused, time-boxed sprints with clear milestones.
Compound
We design for invisible intelligence — AI that makes your product or process feel faster, sharper, and more capable without requiring users to learn a new workflow. Adoption is built into the architecture, not bolted on afterward.
How an engagement works
01
Take the 5-question AI Opportunity Diagnostic. Get an immediate personalized output showing your highest-leverage AI opportunity areas and what they unlock at your stage.
02
A 25-minute call with a senior Kerning advisor. We pressure-test your diagnostic results, clarify your constraints, and scope what a first engagement would look like. No pitch — just the right next question.
03
A focused 1–2 week discovery engagement to define the problem precisely, validate the technical approach, and produce a build specification your team — or ours — can execute against.
04
Time-boxed delivery in 6–12 week sprints. Working software at every milestone. You own the output, the codebase, and the roadmap.
Selected work · Anonymized client examples
We don't do proof-of-concept theater. Every project in this section is in production, used daily, and delivering against a business metric that mattered before we arrived. Client identities are anonymized; results are real.
A 200-person legal services firm was spending 4+ hours per contract on manual clause extraction, risk flagging, and summary generation. We designed a document intelligence pipeline — custom extraction model, structured output layer, and a reviewer-facing UI — that reduced per-contract processing time by 95% and increased the volume each associate could handle from 2 to 17 per day.
A regional healthcare group was manually triaging inbound referrals across 4 intake coordinators — an 8–72 hour process with significant error rates on specialty routing. Kerning built an intelligent intake agent that classifies, routes, and drafts response communications automatically — with human escalation logic for edge cases. Error rate dropped from 14% to under 2%. Average response time: 4 minutes.
A 300-person SaaS company had 8 years of customer data — support tickets, product feedback, usage logs — that was functionally inaccessible to their product and CS teams. We designed and shipped a natural language query layer on top of their existing data warehouse that gave any team member access to customer intelligence without analyst involvement.
A wealth management firm's advisors were spending the majority of their day on client prep, note-taking, and post-meeting follow-up — not client development. Kerning built a meeting intelligence layer integrated with their calendar and CRM: auto-generated prep briefs, real-time note structuring, and post-meeting action drafts. Average advisor time reclaimed: 11 hours per week.
Who this is built for
We're not for everyone — and we're upfront about that. Kerning works best when there's a real problem, a team with enough infrastructure to build on, and a decision-maker who wants to ship something that works — not commission a strategy deck.
We're the wrong choice if you need enterprise procurement timelines, advisory-only deliverables, or someone to validate a decision that's already been made.
Good fit
Not the right fit
What we build
These are the eight domains where Kerning has the deepest implementation experience — and where AI creates the most durable leverage for mid-market companies. Your diagnostic result maps to one or two of these based on your specific profile, constraints, and pain.
About the practice
Kerning Consulting is the advisory arm of Kerning Technologies — an AI-native product studio that has been designing and building AI-powered products since before it was fashionable. Our consulting practice exists because we kept getting pulled into conversations earlier in the process: companies that knew they needed AI but didn't know what to build, in what order, or why.
Every advisor at Kerning has shipped production AI systems. We don't have a research team that produces frameworks — we have a delivery team that produces working software, and the scars to know what breaks in production versus what looks good in a slide deck.
Our engagements are deliberately sized. We don't do retainers without deliverables. We don't bill hours without milestones. And we never take an engagement we don't think we can win.
Diagnose before prescribing
Every engagement starts with understanding the actual problem — not the stated one. We push back on briefs. It's how we earn the right to build.
Ship, don't deck
Our output is working software in your production environment, not a roadmap document. Advisory deliverables exist only to unlock build decisions.
You own everything
Every line of code, every model, every integration we build is yours. We don't create dependencies. We create capability.
Common questions
Most agencies build what you ask for. We start by questioning whether you're asking for the right thing. Every Kerning engagement begins with a diagnostic that often reframes the original brief. We've walked away from projects we didn't think we could deliver real value on. Trust is more valuable to us than a larger engagement.
Most first engagements run 6–12 weeks from signed scope to production deployment. We work in time-boxed sprints with clear milestones — you'll never be six months in without knowing exactly what's been built and what's next.
Scoping sprints start at $15K–$25K. Build engagements range from $50K to $300K depending on scope and complexity. We don't bill hourly — every engagement is fixed-scope and milestone-based. The diagnostic call is free, and we'll tell you in the first conversation whether the numbers make sense before you ever see a proposal.
Yes, with caveats. We've built complete AI systems for companies with no technical staff. But we're honest: the sustainability of those systems depends on either building your internal capability alongside the product or maintaining a support relationship after delivery. We structure both options.
Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Mistral, and open-source models depending on the use case, compliance requirements, and cost architecture. We're model-agnostic and platform-agnostic. We build on your existing stack where possible, and we argue for boring technology over exciting technology.
Almost always. Most of our integrations are with existing CRMs, ERPs, document management systems, and data warehouses. The stack you have is almost never the constraint — it's the data quality, process clarity, and decision-making structure that determine success.
You receive your personalized AI Opportunity output on the results page, plus a follow-up email with your written brief. If you book a strategy session, we'll spend 25 minutes pressure-testing the output with you, clarifying constraints, and scoping what a first engagement might look like. No commitment required — and we'll tell you honestly if now isn't the right time.
Yes. The diagnostic is a tool for you to understand your own AI opportunity landscape. The output is genuinely personalized and genuinely useful regardless of whether you work with Kerning. We publish it because it builds trust — and because the companies that go through it have a sharper conversation with us afterward.
Talk to the team
Not a pitch. Not a capabilities walkthrough. A sharp diagnostic conversation about the specific AI opportunity your company is closest to unlocking — and whether Kerning is the right partner to help you unlock it.