Start with evidence
Observe the current work and establish a baseline before promising a result.
AI strategy for established businesses
Decide what AI should change in your business, and build the first piece with your team.
AI is probably already in your company: switched on inside software you pay for, picked up by staff on their own, with nobody deciding how it should be used. 013 Labs helps owners and boards of established businesses decide what AI should change, in what order, and what to leave alone; who owns each move and how it is measured. Then we build the first piece with your team, with control that stays visible.
Led by an operator, a lawyer by training, who helped scale a regional company into a major participant in a highly regulated national industry, and who builds and runs AI systems every day.
The board's agenda
The three questions a board will ask.
- Where does AI change the economics of our business, and where does it make no difference?
- Which few changes are worth making first, and how far are we from them?
- Who owns each move, and how will we know it worked?
All eight questions the plan must answer are on the strategy page.
The moment it becomes urgent
When the board asks for an AI plan, you need one that survives the second question.
The question rarely arrives once. It comes from the boardroom, the buyer, the lender and the market, often in the same quarter.
The board meeting
Someone asks what the company is doing about AI. The honest answer is a few experiments that nobody owns.
The buyer's diligence list
A buyer or investor asks how AI affects your margins, your staffing and your risk. The data room has no page for it.
The lender's question
Your lender asks how the business will hold its margins as competitors change the way they work.
The competitor's announcement
A competitor starts answering customers faster. Your team is already at capacity.
Waiting to choose a direction leaves the choice to a vendor, to whoever runs IT, or to the competitor who moved first.
The definition
What we mean by "AI-native"
An AI-native company is the same company, with the same customers and people, in which AI does the routine preparation (gathering, checking, drafting, matching), named people make the decisions, and the rules between the two are written down.
What you get from it: when a board, a lender or a buyer asks what the company is doing about AI, the answer is already on paper, and the time the team gets back goes where the owner chose.
AI prepares the work; people make the decisions.
Gathering, checking, drafting and matching are designed around what current tools do well. Judgment, relationships and sign-off stay with named people.
The company record answers management's questions.
Contracts, orders, invoices and reports become usable by management, so a question about a customer or a margin is answered from the records instead of rebuilt in a meeting.
Decision rights and approvals are written down.
Who decides, what needs approval, what counts as an exception, and how to stop a system are explicit for every workflow that matters.
The team gains capacity, not a second job.
People spend less time copying, chasing and checking, and nobody becomes the full-time minder of a new tool.
Success is measured as business change against a baseline.
Margin, speed, cash, errors and capacity, each measured before and after the change.
Field note: what an AI-native legacy business actually looks like →
How the work fits together
Three ways to work with 013 Labs, in the order a board would use them.
Most owners start with a briefing or a strategy sprint. The sprint defines the first build; the First Build Sprint delivers it. Evidence from the diagnostic offers feeds the plan.
Advise
Decide the plan.
For owners and boards who need an AI position and a plan in the right order.
- AI Board Briefing
- AI Strategy Sprint
- Fractional AI Strategy Lead
Find the evidence.
Before money is spent, see what the company record and the work itself say.
- 013BI readiness pilot
- Workflow Fix Review
Build the first piece.
Working systems in the tools you already use, each with an owner, a measure and a way to stop it.
- First Build Sprint
- Ongoing improvement
- Founding pilots and products
Prices are on the strategy and services pages. Pricing and timing are confirmed in writing; a request does not create an engagement.
Who leads the work
The plan comes from someone who has run one.
An AI plan for an established company needs someone who has run a business and someone who can build. At 013 Labs that is the same person.
- Operator. Darren Weiss helped scale a regional company into a major participant in a highly regulated national industry, leading operations, growth, and mergers and acquisitions.
- Counsel. A lawyer by training who led the legal and regulatory work. Data terms, liability and lock-in are reviewed before you sign, working alongside your counsel, not replacing it.
- Builder. He designs, builds and runs AI systems every day.
013 Labs runs on the systems we recommend: our board packet, sales preparation and research are prepared by them and approved by a named person, so we test the advice before we give it.
That is our method, not a client result.
How we judge the work
Useful is more demanding than impressive.
Make authority visible
Name what the system may do, what a person must approve, and how to stop it.
Measure the business change
Track time, rework, delay, quality, adoption and exceptions; demonstrations and software scores do not count.
Bring the question your board is asking.
Thirty minutes is enough to tell whether you need a briefing, a sprint, or nothing yet.