Before You Hire Anyone

Here's what you can already do.

A lot of what businesses want from AI is already available, off the shelf, for the price of a software subscription. This page is our honest starting point: what modern AI assistants can do for you today — no consultants required.

Easy Wins

Connect your tools, then just ask

AI assistants like Claude connect directly to the software you already use. Once connected, the work happens in plain English. A few examples:

Email

Tame the inbox

Connect Gmail or Outlook and ask for summaries, drafts, and follow-up lists — without forwarding anything anywhere.

"Which emails from this week still need a reply? Draft responses for the top three."
Calendar

Prep without the scramble

Connect your calendar and get briefed before meetings — who's attending, what's outstanding, what was said last time.

"What's on my calendar tomorrow? Pull the email history for the 10am."
Documents

Read the pile for you

Drop in PDFs, Word docs, or whole folders. Get summaries, comparisons, and answers with the source cited.

"Compare these three vendor proposals and flag the differences in payment terms."
Spreadsheets

Analysis in plain English

Hand over an Excel file and ask questions about it. Get charts, pivot-style summaries, and cleaned-up data back.

"Here's our sales export. What changed month-over-month, and which customers drove it?"
Writing

First drafts of everything

Proposals, job posts, SOPs, customer replies — drafted in your tone, from your notes, in minutes instead of afternoons.

"Turn these bullet points into a one-page project update for the leadership team."
Research

Look things up properly

Current information from the web, gathered and summarized with sources — competitor moves, regulations, market pricing.

"Summarize the new overtime rules for Wisconsin and what they mean for a 40-person company."
In Plain English

Connectors and skills, without the jargon

Modern AI assistants have two features worth knowing about. Connectors link the assistant to tools you already use — Gmail, Google Drive, your calendar, Slack, your CRM — so it can read and act on real information instead of guessing. Skills are pre-built instructions for common jobs: building a spreadsheet the right way, formatting a report, preparing a slide deck.

Setting these up takes minutes, not weeks. There's no code involved. Most teams can get real value in the first afternoon — and if you want to go deeper at your own pace, Anthropic offers free self-paced courses designed for non-technical professionals.

We're telling you this because it's true, and because clients who've tried the off-the-shelf tools have the best instincts about where those tools stop being enough.

A first afternoon with Claude
01

Sign up

A standard Claude plan covers everything on this page.

02

Connect one tool

Start with email or your calendar. It's a permissions screen, not a setup project.

03

Ask about real work

Not trivia — your actual inbox, your actual spreadsheet, this week's actual problem.

04

Notice where it stops

The places it can't reach are interesting. That's usually where the custom work lives.

The Guide Library

Free guides, written by us, for you

One page per tool: what it does, how to set it up in two minutes, and prompts you can copy for real work. No email required, no gate. Take what's useful.

Connectors — plug Claude into your tools
Skills — teach Claude to make finished work
An Honest Note

If this page solves your problem, you don't need us.

That's not a trick. Plenty of businesses get what they need from off-the-shelf AI, and we'd rather you find that out for free than pay us to tell you.

But some problems don't fit the off-the-shelf mold: data that can't leave your building, workflows tangled across systems, work that's specific to how your business runs. When you hit one of those, the next page is for you.

When You Outgrow the Shelf

See how we build what off-the-shelf can't.

Custom tools, built to a signed specification, owned by your team.

How We Build