AI consulting services for mid-market firms

We build one system,for one bottleneck.

Bottleneck Labs builds custom AI systems for mid-market firms in six-week engagements at a flat rate. Knowledge search over your own documents, proposal and RFP drafting, compliance checks, and internal tools that replace the workbook only one person can maintain.

There is no product to buy here and no license to renew. Each engagement starts by naming the budget line the work is meant to move, and ends with software your team uses and your firm owns.

How the six weeks run

Same shape every time, different system every time.

01

Ready

We find the budget line the work is supposed to move, and agree on the number we are aiming at before anything is designed.

02

Embed

50+ hours inside your firm, watching the people who do the work. The rules that matter are almost always the undocumented ones.

03

Build

Working software on top of or beside the systems you already run, shaped by what we saw rather than by a template.

04

Hand over

You own the system and the code. Documentation written for the people who will run it, not for us.

Pricing

Priced against your budget, not our hours.

  • Flat rate, scoped in writing before we start. No hourly billing, no overrun charges, no mid-project upsell.
  • Engagements run $12K to $100K or more. The number depends on what we are building, not on how long it takes us.
  • Pricing is tied to a line item in your budget. If you spend a known amount on proposal writing or contract review each year, that number is the target. If the system does not move it, we failed.
  • Six weeks from kickoff to a working system, with 50+ hours spent inside your firm before anyone writes code.
Questions

What people ask before they hire us.

What services does Bottleneck Labs offer?

Custom AI system development for mid-market firms: knowledge and document search over your own data, proposal and RFP drafting, compliance and quality checks, workflow automation, and internal tools that replace the spreadsheet only one person understands. Every engagement is built to the firm rather than configured from a product.

Do you sell a platform or a license?

No. There is no product to buy, no seat count and no lock-in. We build the system, hand over the code and the documentation, and you own it. That is also why we can tell you honestly when the right answer is buying something off the shelf instead.

What size of company do you work with?

Usually 20 to 500 people. Smaller than that and the problem is normally solved by a tool you can buy. Much larger and you have internal teams who should be doing this work, though we do sometimes come in beside them on a single scoped build.

Where are you based and who do you work with?

Toronto, Ontario. We work in person across the Greater Toronto Area and remotely across Canada. The embed phase works either way, though for the first engagement with a firm we prefer to be in the room.

Tell us where the work is stuck.

The first conversation is a diagnosis, not a pitch. If you do not need us, we will tell you that instead.

Start a conversation