Services

Three engagements. Same opinionated method. Different shaped answers.

What you actually buy.

Every NS Studio engagement starts with the same question: what would actually move your business in the next 90 days? Then we work backwards to the smallest number of decisions that get you there.

The shape of the work

What we do. What we don't.

The clearest way to know if a partner fits is to know where their edges are. Ours are sharp on purpose.

We do

  • Decide what to build
  • Kill bad AI projects
  • Prioritize the roadmap
  • Define decision rights and kill criteria
  • Audit ROI

We don't

  • Build it
  • Maintain what gets built
  • Write code
  • Design full org charts
  • Debate model benchmarks

We don't build AI. We decide what should exist, and what shouldn't.

Engagement A · 2–3 weeks

Pilot Triage

Which AI pilots are quietly burning cash, which are working, and which one should you ship next? You leave with an explicit kill list and a ranked, defended answer.

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What we deliver

  • Explicit kill list with reasoning, what to stop and why
  • Ranked ROI scorecard for every active and proposed AI initiative
  • Roadmap pressure-test against the core assumption
  • One-page strategic memo your CEO and CFO can both sign
  • 90-day execution plan with weekly milestones

Best fit if

  • You have 3+ AI initiatives competing for the same budget
  • Leadership disagrees about priorities
  • You suspect at least one of your "wins" isn't real
  • A pilot has run for 6+ months without a kill-or-ship decision
Engagement B · 4–6 weeks

AI workflow design

Map every workflow your team actually does. Redesign the three that matter with AI in the loop. Outcome: hours per person per week, returned and measured.

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What we deliver

  • Workflow audit across 1–3 teams (interviews, observation, time studies)
  • Three redesigned workflows with AI-in-the-loop spec
  • Tooling decisions: build vs. buy vs. compose
  • Implementation runbooks your team can follow without us
  • Before/after measurement plan, hours saved, errors avoided, throughput

Best fit if

  • Your team is using AI tools but no one knows what changed
  • You want measurable productivity gains, not vibes
  • Operations, support, content, sales ops, or research workflows
Engagement C · Monthly retainer

AI governance & team management

The unglamorous work that determines whether AI pays back , policy, evals, model selection, vendor decisions, and AI team hiring. A senior partner in the room, on retainer.

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What we deliver

  • AI use policy your legal team can actually approve
  • Model selection & evaluation framework, written for your domain
  • Vendor decisions: which to keep, which to drop, which to negotiate
  • Hiring rubric for AI roles, PMs, engineers, applied researchers
  • Monthly review cadence with founder & engineering leads

Best fit if

  • You're scaling AI use across multiple teams and need guardrails
  • Compliance, regulated industry, or public-sector context
  • You want senior advisory without hiring a Chief AI Officer
Scope, plainly

What we assess. What we don't.

"No code" is not the same as "no judgment about what's buildable." Here's where our assessment lives, and where it doesn't.

We assess
We don't assess
Decision logic and kill criteria
Ownership and accountability gaps
Vendor selection and contract risk
Data readiness for governance
ROI measurement framework
Model architecture or fine-tuning
Infrastructure or GPU planning
Code review or system design
Data engineering or pipeline build
Model benchmark debates

For the right-column work, you need a different kind of help. We'll tell you what that help should cost and how to evaluate it.

Honesty matters

What we deliberately don't do.

The fastest way to know if a partner is right is to know what they refuse. Here's our list.

  • We don't sell decks. Every deliverable is a working decision document, plan, or specification, not a slide-ware showpiece.
  • We don't take on engagements where we'd be the sixth opinion. If you've already had three consultancies in and decisions still aren't being made, the problem isn't strategy, it's something else, and we'll tell you what.
  • We don't build production code. We design the spec, pick the tools, and supervise the build, but we partner with engineering teams (yours or ours), not become them.
  • We work with a small number of clients at any one time. The whole point is senior, founder-led attention. Capacity is the feature.
How we think

The same diagnostic. Every engagement.

We don't reinvent the framework for each client. We adapt one. The version below is the prompt we run on every engagement, the question we are paid to answer. 

<role>
Act as an AI product evaluator who has
reviewed hundreds of pilots and knows
which ones pay back and which ones
quietly die.
</role>

<task>
Pressure-test the AI roadmap. Find every
fatal flaw before another quarter is
wasted on the wrong thing.
</task>

<rules>
- Every flaw specific to this business
- Verdict direct, never "it has
  potential but"
- Fatal flaws ranked by severity
</rules>

<output>
Verdict → Three Fatal Flaws →
Highest-Profit Product → 90-Day Plan
</output>

Why a prompt, not a deck.

A deck describes a method. A prompt forces it. We write the diagnostic in this form because it survives delegation, you can hand it to anyone senior in your org, run it on your roadmap, and get a useful answer in an afternoon.

The full version we run includes 14 sub-prompts, calibration questions, and the priors we use to weigh switching costs against ROI. Clients receive it as part of the Strategy Sprint deliverable.

Read the brand spec →

The artifact you can't write yourself

Every engagement ends with a kill list.

Not a deprioritize. Not a revisit-next-quarter. Kill. The cost of running a doomed pilot for another quarter isn't the budget, it's the credibility you spend defending it.

Kill list · illustrative · yours will be specific
  • ✕ Vendor X enterprise renewal ROI undefended after 9 months
  • ✕ Internal LLM fine-tuning project Duplicates a vendor offering at 4× cost
  • ✕ AI Center of Excellence Slack channel Meetings without decisions
  • ✕ Customer support copilot v2 v1 hasn't shipped
  • ✕ "AI strategy" steering committee 12 attendees, zero owners

Not sure which engagement fits?

A 30-minute call is enough to know. We'll tell you which engagement makes sense, or tell you honestly that none does.

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