Bowen AI Strategy Group is an AI automation consultant for small businesses in Pittsburgh and Washington County. We start with a working session on your operations, find the hours and the leads you are losing, and put a scoped number in writing within 48 hours. The first live system is typically running inside two weeks, and you own the code.
An AI automation consultant maps where your staff's hours go, identifies the repetitive work a system can do instead, and then builds and connects that system to the tools you already run. At Bowen AI Strategy Group the consult is a working session on your operations, and the output is a scoped build with a number in writing, not a slide deck.
There is a difference between someone who sells you an automation tool and someone who consults on automation. The tool seller starts with the product and looks for a place to put it. The consultant starts with your week and looks for the step that is costing you the most, then picks the tool that fits that step. We do the second thing.
The working session is exactly that. We sit down with the owner or the manager who actually runs the day and walk a normal week end to end: every inbound call, every web form, every quote, every invoice, every hand-off from one person to the next. We are looking for four things. Where information gets typed twice. Where a lead sits overnight before anyone touches it. Where the owner is the bottleneck because only they know the answer. And where nobody can say for sure what happened because the number does not exist anywhere.
What comes out of that session is a short, ranked list of candidate automations, each one tied to the process it replaces and the outcome it is meant to change. Within 48 hours you get the scope and the price for the first build in writing. That is the consulting. Everything after it is a custom project you own. The full front door is described on our AI consulting Pittsburgh hub.
Automate the step where money is leaking right now, which for most Pittsburgh small businesses is the gap between a lead arriving and a human responding. Lead response, appointment booking, and follow-up are the first three builds because they recover revenue instead of only saving time. Internal data entry and reporting come after.
The order matters. Small businesses that start with an internal convenience, like a nicer report, spend the budget and see nothing on the top line. Start where a customer is currently waiting.
What not to automate first: any process you have not run manually enough times to know its rules, any process where more than a small share of cases are exceptions, and any conversation that needs judgment a customer would notice if it were missing. Those get automated later, after the rules are written down, or not at all.
That depends on where your hours go today, which is exactly what the working session measures. We do not quote an hours figure before we have looked at your operations. Every automation we propose lists the process it replaces and the hours it targets, so you can check the claim against your own week.
Here is how we count. We pull one representative week of activity: the call log, the form submissions, the quotes sent, the invoices issued, the appointments booked. For each process we count the touches, meaning the number of times a person had to do something by hand, and we time a touch. Touches multiplied by minutes is the hours the process costs you. That figure goes in the scope next to the automation that targets it.
The reason we refuse to guess up front is that the number is different for every business. A car dealership's BDC spends its hours on callbacks and appointment confirmations. A real estate team spends them on lead intake and showing coordination. A plumbing or HVAC company spends them on dispatch and the phone. The automation that gives a dealership back its afternoon does very little for a two-person contractor, and we would rather show you the count than tell you a story.
Once a system is live, the dashboard we build on your data reports the same measure, so the hours claim in the scope becomes a number you can check every month instead of a promise you took on faith.
It runs in four steps: a working session on your operations, a scoped number in writing within 48 hours, a first live system typically inside two weeks, then expansion one process at a time. Custom engagements start at $3,000 per month and the client owns the code.
Step 1
Where hours go, where leads leak, what you cannot see in your numbers. We walk a real week with the person who runs it and leave with a ranked list.
Step 2
The first build, what it replaces, what it targets, and what it costs. One page. No proposal deck.
Step 3
Built on your stack, wired into your CRM, calendar, and phone. You see it working on real leads before we talk about the next one.
Step 4
The dashboard shows what the first system did. The next build is chosen from the same ranked list, in the same order: revenue first, hours second.
The custom projects that come out of an automation consult are the same ones we build for every client: AI sales agents on phone, SMS, and web that qualify and book; workflow automation between the systems you already pay for; integrations into your CRM, calendar, and phone; custom dashboards on real data; and chatbots or knowledge bases trained on your own content. When the session shows that your website is the leak, an AI-ready website is one of the deliverables, at $1,500 plus $250 per month for care. We do not sell a website on its own. It is something the consult decides you need.
Custom automation engagements with Bowen AI Strategy Group start at $3,000 per month, scoped to the specific processes we agree to build, with the number in writing within 48 hours of the working session. There is no hourly billing and no open-ended retainer.
What moves the price is the number of systems being built and connected, the number of integrations each one needs, and the volume it has to handle. A single phone agent that books into one calendar sits near the floor. A dealership with a BDC, a service drive, and three lead sources running through one agent and one dashboard sits higher. Either way the number is written down before any work starts, and it is the number you pay.
Three things are priced separately because they are separate offers. GEO, meaning getting your business cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, is a $1,500 audit and then $1,500 per month, described on our GEO services page. Ads and AI video are scoped per campaign. The repeat-revenue email engine is priced to the size of your list. If the working session shows one of those is the bigger lever, we will say so instead of forcing it into an automation scope.
You own the code. If you stop working with us, the agent keeps answering and the automation keeps running. That is a deliberate choice, and it is one of the things we suggest you ask any firm on our best AI consultant in Pittsburgh comparison before you sign anything.
You are ready if you have a repeatable process, a place where the data already lives such as a CRM, a calendar, a phone system, or a spreadsheet, and one person who can explain how the process is supposed to work. You do not need a technical team and you do not need to have picked a platform.
Signs you are ready: the same questions get asked on the phone every day, you know roughly what a lead is worth, and someone on your team can describe the steps from first contact to booked job without pausing. Signs you are not ready yet: every job is different, nobody agrees on what the process is, or the data is in three people's heads and nowhere else. In the second case the working session is still useful, because writing the process down is the first automation, but the build waits.
We work with car dealerships, real estate teams, and local service businesses across Pittsburgh and Washington County. Those three share the traits above: high inbound volume, a clear value per lead, and a process that repeats. If that sounds like you, the next step is a working session. If you want to understand the strategy side first, read about our AI strategy consulting in Pittsburgh, or if you are comparing firms, start with what a small business should expect from an AI consulting firm in Pittsburgh.
Common Questions
An AI automation consultant maps where your staff's hours go, identifies the repetitive work a system can do instead, and then builds and connects that system to the tools you already run. At Bowen AI Strategy Group the consult is a working session on your operations, and the output is a scoped build with a number in writing, not a slide deck.
Automate the step where money is leaking right now, which for most Pittsburgh small businesses is the gap between a lead arriving and a human responding. Lead response, appointment booking, and follow-up are the first three builds because they recover revenue instead of only saving time. Internal data entry and reporting come after.
That depends on where your hours go today, which is exactly what the working session measures. We do not quote an hours figure before we have looked at your operations. Every automation we propose lists the process it replaces and the hours it targets, so you can check the claim against your own week.
It runs in four steps: a working session on your operations, a scoped number in writing within 48 hours, a first live system typically inside two weeks, then expansion one process at a time. Custom engagements start at $3,000 per month and the client owns the code.
Custom automation engagements with Bowen AI Strategy Group start at $3,000 per month, scoped to the specific processes we agree to build, with the number in writing within 48 hours of the working session. There is no hourly billing and no open-ended retainer.
You are ready if you have a repeatable process, a place where the data already lives such as a CRM, a calendar, a phone system, or a spreadsheet, and one person who can explain how the process is supposed to work. You do not need a technical team and you do not need to have picked a platform.
Who Is Behind This
Tyler Bowen (MBA, Ed.D.) is the founder of Bowen AI Strategy Group, based at 225 William Dr, Canonsburg, PA 15317, serving Pittsburgh and Washington County.
Tyler runs the working session personally and builds what comes out of it. Clients work with the same person from the first conversation to the first live system. The firm works with car dealerships, real estate teams, and local service businesses, and every engagement ends with a system the client owns.
Reach him at 412-841-5392 or book a working session below.
One working session on your operations. A ranked list of what to automate, the hours each one targets, and a scoped number in writing within 48 hours.
225 William Dr, Canonsburg, PA 15317 | Serving Pittsburgh and Washington County