The AI Opportunity Audit
A fixed-scope diagnostic that shows a founder-led consumer brand where AI belongs in its operations, merchandising, content and service, where it doesn’t, and what to build first. Engagements start at $7,500 and take about two weeks from kickoff.
What does an AI opportunity audit include?
The AI Opportunity Audit looks at four parts of a consumer brand and, for each one, decides what AI should carry and what should stay with a person. I start with the work your team actually does every week (the tools come later), follow where the time and the judgment go, and draw the line on purpose instead of by default.
Operations: fulfillment, inventory, order exceptions, and the weekly reporting nobody wants to do.
Merchandising: product data, feeds and listings, pricing and promotions.
Content: email, product pages and editorial, plus the voice rules that keep all of it sounding like you.
Service: the inbox, returns, reviews, and the questions that arrive at midnight.
What do you get at the end?
You get a prioritized roadmap and a live readout. The roadmap ranks each opportunity by value and effort, says what to build, what to buy and what to skip, and marks the places where AI should stay out. Then we walk through it together with whoever on your team will carry it forward.
How long does it take?
About two weeks from kickoff, once we have access to your tools, and most of it runs in the background. It takes a kickoff call, access to the tools you already use, and a few short conversations with the people closest to the work, and then we meet for the readout.
What does it cost?
An AI Opportunity Audit starts at $7,500. The final number depends on the size of the team, how many systems are involved, and how many calls it will take to cover all the aspects of your organization. We agree on the full scope and price in writing before any work begins.
Who is it for?
Founder-led consumer, D2C and CPG brands with real revenue, roughly $1M to $20M a year, with real operational pain and no one senior deciding where AI fits: big enough to need senior judgment, too small to hire it full-time. It isn’t the right fit for pre-revenue startups, for anyone who wants a chatbot set up and maintained, or for companies large enough to hire a full-time head of AI (which they should).
Why not just build it in-house?
You can, and the audit is how you avoid building the wrong thing first. A senior in-house AI lead is a six-figure hire that rarely pencils out at this size, and “in-house” often means a capable junior person wiring tools together without a plan. The audit sets the direction your team then executes, so the first six months of effort land somewhere useful.
What happens after the audit?
Some brands take the roadmap and run with it. Others keep me on as a fractional AI strategist, about two days a month, to make the architecture calls, review what the team builds and keep the voice intact. Either way, the audit stands on its own.
Why work with me on this?
Because a list of the best AI tools for running your business can’t tell you how to set them up for yours, and a system deployed without that judgment costs money and time instead of saving them. And because Sugar Wood and One Potato both run on an AI operating system I built myself, so every recommendation in the audit has been tested on a real inventory, a real inbox and a real editorial calendar before it reaches yours.
Tell me about the brand, roughly where revenue sits, and what’s breaking.