AI consulting company for service businesses

Plainbuilt is an AI consulting company for service and manufacturing businesses running $5M to $50M. A fractional AI lead embedded 2 days a week for 90 days audits your workflows, writes a 12-month roadmap, and ships your highest-priority system inside the 90 days, with ROI measured monthly against your baseline. Not a strategy deck that sits in a drawer.

It gives a $5M to $50M business the technical leadership to choose, build, and measure AI without a full-time executive. The fractional lead audits your workflows, tech stack, data, and team; picks the top 3 opportunities by ROI; writes a 12-month roadmap with a business case, vendor recommendation, budget, and success metric for each initiative; leads vendor selection and build sprints; drives adoption; and reports ROI monthly against your baseline. It starts with a 30-minute working session.

It fixes four common situations: you know AI matters and every vendor pitches something different; a past AI experiment that nobody adopted and still costs $2K a month; a VP of AI you cannot justify at $250K+; and projects that launch with nobody driving adoption or holding vendors to account.

Is Plainbuilt an AI consulting agency or a fractional lead?

An agency builds what you ask for. The fractional lead works out what you should be building in the first place, then oversees the build, whether your own team does it or a vendor like us. Plainbuilt is the second kind. If you are comparing it with an AI consulting agency for a service business, ask both the same two questions: who decides what gets built, and who answers for the number once it ships.

Two commitments are in writing before anything is built. The diagnosis ends with a revenue leak map and an ROI projection in 1 to 2 weeks, and we tell you not to hire us if projected year-one ROI is under 3x. The roadmap is yours whether or not we proceed together. After the 90 days you have 1 to 2 systems live, documentation your team can keep executing from, and the option of a monthly advisory retainer, which many clients take.

The role is described in depth in Fractional CAIO: what it is and who needs one, including who does not need one: a business under $3M, or a team that already has a roadmap and just needs builders. The five ways these projects fail, the wrong problem, nothing wired in, no baseline, no owner, and a first project that is too big, are in why AI projects fail in service businesses; the engagement exists to prevent each one. The engagement on this site that ran this way is the regional concrete contractor: diagnosis in weeks 1 to 2, architecture in weeks 3 to 4, a voice agent in weeks 5 to 8, quote generation in weeks 9 to 12.

What does it look like for a manufacturing business?

AI consulting for manufacturing businesses runs on the same 90 days the fractional CAIO article lays out: days 1 to 30 audit the operation and rank the top 3 opportunities by ROI, days 30 to 60 build the 12-month roadmap, days 60 to 90 ship and measure the first system. On a shop the audit starts where the RFQ audit starts: six months of RFQ data, material costs, and won/lost outcomes pulled from JobBOSS or Epicor. The problems it weighs are the ones on the AI agents for manufacturers page: 20 RFQs a week answered in 5 to 7 days while the buyer awards the job to someone faster, a planner working from memory and gut feel, and buyers calling for status because there is no real-time visibility without someone checking the floor.

The first system on a shop's roadmap would be RFQ automation, the manufacturing version of quote automation: your estimator's logic, material markups, complexity tiers, and lead-time rules are modeled into an email agent that drafts a quote in minutes from your historical job data and material pricing. It generates quotes alongside your estimator for two weeks, every quote reviewed before it is sent, with production cutover at week 6 of that build. The scheduling copilot (6 to 8 weeks) follows for shops with complicated job mixes, and the customer portal agent (3 to 4 weeks) gives buyers live order status with role-based access. All three deploy into JobBOSS, Epicor, SAP Business One, and NetSuite.

You can watch the RFQ agent work before the working session: the scripted demo is an RFQ landing in a fabrication shop's inbox, with no sign-in and no API key, and the names and numbers are made up. No manufacturing case study is published yet; the first is published when its numbers are. Details to follow