Why us

Strategy-firm rigour, engineering depth, and a Silicon Valley view of what is possible.

Six reasons executives choose us over a consultancy or a software vendor.

Why us

A consulting firm leaves a report. A software vendor leaves a licence. We leave a working system, running in your tenant, measured in your own numbers, and we stay to make it compound. Demos bore us. A number moving in your P&L does not.

01

Measured on your P&L

Every system starts from the P&L line it moves and is judged against a baseline you agreed. If it does not return more than it costs, it does not scale. Our incentives are tied to your numbers, not to billable hours.

02

Operators, not slide-makers

We are operators, engineers and former strategy consultants who have run P&Ls, carried budgets and shipped systems in the industries we serve. Our founding partner spent 15 years at Kearney, most recently as a partner in the consumer and retail practice. The people in the first meeting are the people who do the work, and they sit with your teams, not in a war room down the hall.

03

Built around you, owned by you

We do not bend your business into the shape of an off-the-shelf tool. We build around your data, your rules, your people and your systems, and what we build belongs to you: the model, the data and the intelligence layer of your own operation.

04

One model that compounds

Every system sits on the same operating system of your business, so each one sharpens the model behind the next. Pilots that start from a prompt and a raw export stall. Ours build on each other.

05

Frontier access, applied

We work with research labs at Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Stanford and UC Berkeley, and use the latest models and agent tooling daily, then translate them into systems a quoting desk, a claims team or a procurement office can rely on. You get the frontier without having to staff it.

06

In your tenant, for the long term

Systems run in your own cloud, in your region, under your data rules, with a person approving anything that matters. We stay through the month-six gate and beyond, because that is when the compounding starts.

Built by experts from

Research partners

We work as a long-term partner.

How we work

AI transformation has to go further than a pilot. It has to change a number. So we start from the P&L, build with your team rather than for it, ship a working system into daily work, and stay to run it, measure it and extend it. The relationship compounds, because every system we add sits on the same operating system of your business.

Start from the P&L

We pick the function with the largest payback, size it in your own numbers, and say what we would need to see. If the payback is not there, we say so and walk away.

Ship into daily work

A working system inside the tools your team already uses, designed with the people who will run it. No slideware, no platform migration, and the legacy system nobody dares touch is left alone.

Stay and compound

We run the system with you as one team: a weekly improvement loop fed by your people's edits and flags, and monthly steering. The next use cases come from the same roadmap and the same model.

Price on the value we free up

We probe before we quote. Proposals carry named assumptions and a change clause, so a surprise changes the price, not the relationship.

Two ways to work with us.

Ways to collaborate

Winning with AI over the long run needs a team that truly understands your business, and whose interests are aligned with yours. Most enterprises cannot hire that team. So we offer two ways to work together: a conventional engagement priced on the value we free up, or a long-term partnership in which we act as your AI officer and engineering team, with our interests aligned to yours.

01 · Engagement

Scan, pilot, production, priced on the value we free up.

The conventional route. We scope a use case against a P&L line, prove it in your tenant, run it to a measured result, and stay to extend it. Proposals carry named assumptions and a change clause. You own everything we build.

02 · Partnership

Your chief AI officer and engineering team, for equity.

For companies that want AI to be a lasting capability rather than a series of projects, we act as your chief AI officer and your engineering team: setting the roadmap, building and running the operating system of your business, and owning the results year after year. Part of our compensation is equity, so we win only when you do.

Suited to owner-led and private-equity-backed companies with a multi-year horizon. We take on a small number of these partnerships at a time.

Questions executives ask before choosing an AI partner.

FAQ

Straight answers to the questions that come up when an enterprise or a private equity fund is deciding how to put AI to work. If yours is not here, ask us directly.

Choosing a partner

What is an operating system of the business, and why does it matter for an enterprise?

The last generation of SaaS left enterprises with platforms that do not talk to each other and data sitting in systems that were never connected, so the insight in that data rarely reaches a decision.

An operating system of the business is one model of how your business works, built on and connected to the systems you already run:

  • the objects your teams talk about: customers, products, orders, assets, suppliers, contracts
  • the actions the business can take, and the rules that bound them
  • the models that decide, held to a quality floor

Every AI system we build sits on that one model, so it inherits what the last one built instead of starting from a prompt and a raw export. For an enterprise it is the difference between a series of disconnected pilots and a capability that compounds.

What is the difference between an AI consultancy, an AI software vendor and an applied-AI firm?
  • A consultancy leaves a strategy and a roadmap.
  • A software vendor leaves a licence for a product you configure.
  • An applied-AI firm builds and runs working systems inside your operation, on your data, measured by the return they produce.

Collective Intelligence Group is the third kind: strategy-firm rigour, engineering depth, and a team that stays to run what it builds.

Our team can already vibe-code with AI. Why would we still need you?

Because a demo that works on a good day is not a system an enterprise can run on. Vibe-coding gets a prototype in front of people fast, and we encourage it: it shows what is possible. What it does not give you is the engineering that turns a prototype into something a quoting desk or a finance team can rely on every day.

  • A harness around the model. Evaluations that measure accuracy against your own history and hold it to a quality floor every week, guardrails that catch the wrong answer before it acts, and scenarios that show what a decision would do before it is taken.
  • Reliability. Integrations with your ERP and CRM that survive month-end, data that reconciles, retries and monitoring when a system or a model provider fails, and a version of every rule and prompt you can roll back.
  • Enterprise controls. An approval gate, permissions, an audit trail with sources, and deployment in your own tenant so security and legal can sign off.
  • A foundation that compounds. One model of the business underneath, so the second use case builds on the first instead of starting again.

Prototypes prove an idea. Enterprise systems have to be right, on time, at scale, every day, and that is an engineering discipline, not a prompt.

Should an enterprise build, buy or rent AI?

Rent for experiments, build for the operation.

Subscriptions and platforms are fast to start, but the return on AI depends on three things:

  • how much of your operating knowledge a system can act on
  • how many use cases share that model
  • whether the system is allowed to act

Those three compound only when you own the model of your business. We build that model with you, in your own tenant, and it stays yours.

How are applied-AI engagements priced?
  • Scan. A short, fixed-scope engagement of one to two days on site.
  • Pilot and production. Priced on the value they free up, against a baseline agreed before anything is built.

Proposals carry named assumptions and a change clause, so a surprise changes the price, not the relationship. There are no per-seat licences, and you own everything we build.

Getting started

How do we know which AI use case to start with?

Start from the P&L line you already watch, not from the technology.

In a scan we map how the work actually runs in sales, service, operations, procurement and finance, size the payback of each candidate in your own numbers, and rank them. The first system is usually the one with the largest measurable return and the fewest dependencies, so it can run in a team's daily work within a quarter.

Do we need clean data before we can use AI in our operation?

No. Enterprise operations still run on ERPs, shared mailboxes, PDFs, spreadsheets and people who know the rules.

Our systems read that data as it is, reconcile it into one model of the business, and carry lineage back to every source record. Data quality improves as a by-product of running the system, not as a project you have to finish first.

Can your AI systems work with SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Salesforce or a legacy ERP?

Yes. We connect to the systems you already run through their APIs, files and databases, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Salesforce, HubSpot, PLM systems and in-house tools.

Nothing is replaced or migrated. Data reads up into one model of the business, and approved actions write back through a gate you control.

What does human-in-the-loop mean when an AI system is allowed to act?

A person approves anything that matters.

  • Systems draft, match, check and recommend on their own.
  • Actions that write back to your ERP, go to a customer or commit to a supplier pass through an approval gate you configured and can see.
  • Every action carries an audit trail with its sources, and the gate can be tightened or opened as trust is earned.

Risk and results

Why do most enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production?

Because they are designed to impress rather than to run. A pilot built from a prompt and a data export cannot survive live data, exceptions and the tools a team already uses.

Pilots that scale:

  • start from a P&L line with a baseline
  • run in shadow mode on real data
  • are allowed to act through a gate
  • sit on a model of the business that the next use case can reuse
How do you keep AI accurate and safe in regulated industries such as medical devices, aerospace or food?
  • Every model is held to a quality floor that is checked weekly against your own history.
  • Systems run in your tenant, in your region, with role-based access, encryption and an audit trail that records every read, every action and the source behind every fact.
  • Nothing you share trains shared models.
  • A person approves any action with regulatory or contractual consequences.
Which industries do you work with?

Enterprises with real operations: industrial and consumer goods distributors, manufacturers, logistics and supply chain networks, and consumer goods companies, along with the private equity funds that own them. We deploy in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Where is Collective Intelligence Group based, and where do you deploy?

We are based in Silicon Valley, with teams in Singapore and Shenzhen, and we deploy on site with clients in North America, Europe and Asia. We work with research labs at leading universities so the most advanced models and agent tooling reach the operating problems of enterprise clients.