Brass Butler is the AI consulting partner for owner-led services businesses across New Zealand and Australia. We find where your week actually goes, put a costed plan in writing, build the AI brain and AI workforce that take the routine work off your desk, then keep the whole thing running after handover.
If you run a services business of five to fifty people, you have probably had the same week a dozen times. Leads land while you're with a client. Proposals wait for you to find a free evening. Invoices wait for someone to chase them. Every question the team can't answer comes back to your desk. You've read enough about AI to suspect much of this could be handled without you, and you've typed "AI consultant" into a search bar to find out who can actually do it.
The results won't make the choice easy. Some AI consulting firms sell a strategy workshop and leave. Some sell a software licence with a setup fee attached. Some sell hours. A few will build something, hand over the keys and disappear. If you've already trialled a chatbot nobody used, or paid for a course nobody finished, brassed off is a reasonable place to be.
This page sets out what good AI consulting looks like for a business your size, what it costs, how to test whoever you talk to, and how we do it. Read it, then decide whether we're worth thirty minutes of your week.
An AI consultant worth hiring does not hand you a list of apps or a deck about the future of work. For an owner-led business the job has four parts, and a consultant who skips any of them is selling you a piece of the job and calling it the whole.
Find where the owner's hours go, and which of that work needs the owner at all. The calendar, the inbox, the CRM and the phone log tell the story, not the org chart. Most owners find the bottleneck is narrower than they feared: a handful of jobs that only reach them because nothing else catches them.
The moves, in order, with what each one saves and what it takes to build. Ranked by return and by speed, so the first build pays for the second. A plan you could hand to anyone, not only to the person who wrote it.
An AI brain that watches the business and briefs you each morning, and an AI workforce that does the routine work: answering the calls you miss, replying to new leads, drafting proposals, chasing invoices. Installed in your systems, tested on your real work, handed over with the code and the documentation.
The business changes, so the system has to. New services, new staff, new questions from clients. Someone has to keep training the brain and adjusting the workforce, or it drifts out of date inside a year.
Notice what is missing from that list: the slide deck, the software comparison, the vision workshop. They have their place in a large organisation with a transformation budget. In a twelve-person firm they are a way of charging for the part that is easy to sell and skipping the part that is hard to do.
A good AI consultant for a small business also tells you what not to build. Plenty of the work on your desk should stay there, because it is the judgement your clients pay you for. The aim is to take away the work that only reaches you because nothing else catches it, and leave you with the decisions that are genuinely yours. In an accounting or advisory practice, that usually means drafting, client briefs and the billing chase; the professional services page shows what that looks like in practice.
There are five common ways to buy AI help, and the AI consulting firms you'll find sit somewhere among them. Each suits a different business, and each has a trade-off worth knowing before you sign anything.
Strong on diagnosis and the written plan. Usually stops there. You get a clear recommendation and then need someone else to build it, which means briefing a second firm on everything the first one learnt.
Strong on delivery, often fast, usually priced by the project. The risk is that the build starts from your brief rather than a diagnosis, and that the agency's preferred platform decides what gets built. Ask who owns the result.
Flexible and good value for a bounded job, like connecting one workflow between two systems. The risk is a single point of failure: when they move on, the knowledge of how it works goes with them.
Someone who knows the business and stays. The right answer eventually for some larger firms. For a business of five to fifty people it is a full salary for a role that is still being defined, and one person rarely covers strategy, build and upkeep.
Diagnosis, build and keeping, from one firm and one named person. The plan and the build come from the same understanding of your business, the system is owned by you from handover, and the same people keep it current afterwards.
None of the first four is wrong. A strategy consultant is the right call if you already employ developers. A freelancer is the right call for one integration. The partner model exists for the owner who wants the whole thing handled, end to end, without becoming the project manager of their own AI programme. That is the model we run.
Our AI consulting runs in three steps, in the same order every time. The first is paid, because it is real work, and it is the only part of the engagement we price before we know your business.
Pre-work the week before, then two hours one-to-one with Titus, on Zoom or in person in Auckland. We map where your week goes, what reaches you that shouldn't, and what the business already holds that the brain can watch. A written audit, a prioritised plan and a full proposal follow within three business days.
A three-week install. The AI brain, trained on how your business runs. The data layer, so it can see the CRM, the inbox, the calendar and the accounts. The first AI workforce, doing the jobs the Intensive ranked first. Owned by you from handover: the code, the IP and the documentation.
We keep training the brain on what has changed, optimising the workforce, implementing new jobs as new bottlenecks show up, and supporting whoever uses the system day to day. If you'd rather run it in-house, it is already yours, and the documentation tells your team how.
The Intensive is the step owners ask about most, so plainly: it costs $797, it is money-back if the session and the report aren't worth that on their own, and every dollar credits in full to a Foundation build if you go ahead. You leave with the plan whether you build with us, build with someone else or don't build at all. The Intensive page has the full detail, the Foundation page covers the install, and how we work walks through every step from the first call to handover.
Before any of that there is a free thirty-minute discovery call. It exists to work out whether the Intensive is worth your money. Sometimes it isn't, and we say so.
Most AI consulting services are priced in one of three shapes: by the hour, by the project or by the month. Each tells you what the firm is really selling. Hourly pricing sells time. Project pricing sells a build. Ongoing pricing should buy results you can see, and too often buys access to someone who is hard to reach.
We publish one number. The AI Strategy Intensive is $797, money-back, credited in full to any build. Everything after it is scoped during the Intensive, because a price quoted before anyone understands the business is a guess, and the guess is usually padded.
Thirty minutes with Titus to see whether there is a fit.
Two hours one-to-one, a written audit, a prioritised plan and a full proposal within three business days.
Priced in the proposal that comes out of the Intensive, against a plan you have already read. You see the scope, the timeline and the cost before you commit to anything.
AI training, optimisation, implementation and support, sized to what the system does and how fast the business is changing.
The work after handover is the part buyers underestimate. A system that talks to your clients has to keep up with your business: new services, new staff, new questions. Brass tarnishes unless someone tends it, and an AI system drifts unless someone trains it, so we keep it polished. The run-for-you page sets out exactly what that covers.
Whoever you talk to, us included, ask these eight. A good consultant answers them without notes. Several are questions we would fail if we were doing the job badly, which is why they are on the list.
Ian runs AVIT Properties in London. Every reporting cycle took around eighty working hours: data pulled from email, utility accounts and shared drives, reconciled by hand, assembled into reports. It was the clearest first move on the list, because nothing else would hand back as many hours.
Two weeks after the install, the AI workforce was running the full report end to end. Ian's part is now about two hours of review. Eighty hours down to two, bold as brass.
Closer to home, Ray White Milldale runs our Speed to Lead install, so new enquiries get a reply while the agents are still with another buyer. And we run our own firm on the same kind of system, built on Claude, every day: the briefs, the proposals and the follow-ups we would install for you are the ones we use ourselves. More installs are written up on the case studies page.
We're based in Auckland and install across New Zealand and Australia. If you searched for an AI consultant near me and you're in Auckland, the Intensive can run in person. Everywhere else it runs on Zoom, and so does the build: the work happens inside your systems, not in a meeting room, so distance changes nothing about the result. Australian clients are delivered remotely, start to finish.
If you want an AI consultant in NZ who understands how a Kiwi services business runs, from GST to the way clients expect the phone to be answered, Titus has spent twenty years doing operator work in businesses like yours. About Titus and the firm has the longer version.
It depends on the shape: hourly, by the project or ongoing. With us, the AI Strategy Intensive is $797, money-back, and credits in full to a build. Every build is scoped and priced during the Intensive, so you see the cost against a written plan before you commit.
The written plan lands within three business days of the Intensive. A Foundation install takes three weeks, and the first AI workforce is doing real work before the build finishes. Ian at AVIT Properties had his reporting running end to end two weeks after the install.
Not every one. Under five people, the owner can often set up what they need with a few hours and some patience. From five to fifty people, the work that reaches the owner tends to pile up faster than one person can clear it, and that is where a diagnosis and a proper build pay for themselves. The discovery call is where we tell you which side of that line you're on.
Yes. Most of our clients never meet us in person. The Intensive runs on Zoom outside Auckland, and the build happens inside your systems. We deliver across New Zealand and remotely across Australia.
For the discovery call, nothing. For the Intensive, a short brief of around thirty minutes the week before, covering your business, where leads come from, how sales and delivery run, the team, and what you've already tried with AI. It means the two hours go on the real work, not the basics.
You do, from handover. The code, the IP and the documentation are yours. You can keep us on to look after it, run it in-house, or hand it to someone else.
An agency usually builds from your brief and moves on to the next project. A partner diagnoses first, builds against a written plan, hands you ownership and stays to keep the system current as the business changes. Neither is wrong; they suit different owners. We are a partner because the businesses we work with need the keeping as much as the build.
Thirty minutes with Titus. Tell him where the week goes, and he'll tell you whether AI consulting is worth your money yet, and where he would start if it is.
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