What I do
AI that survives contact with the business.
Most AI projects fail on the unglamorous parts: nobody agreed what the system was for, the data lives in four places, and the process it was meant to replace was never written down. That is the work I do first. The model is the easy bit.
Services
Six things, honestly
Some of this runs through Paper Crane with a full team behind it. Some of it is a few conversations and a document. Either is fine.
AI systems
Retrieval, agents and pipelines that do a specific job inside a business and keep doing it without supervision.
Corporate AI strategy
What to adopt, in what order, and what to leave alone. Written down, costed, and readable by people who are not engineers.
AI consulting
Readiness assessments, team training and second opinions for organisations partway into something already.
Business automation
Consolidating the stack, then automating the work between what is left. Usually the cheapest win available.
CRO
Conversion rate optimisation: finding where visitors give up, and whether the cause is the copy, the form or the load time.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation. Search is increasingly a model answering a question, and being the source it quotes is a different discipline from ranking.
How it goes
The audit comes first
Before anything gets built I want to see the stack, the subscriptions, and the spreadsheet someone maintains by hand every Friday. That is usually where the first month of value is, and it costs nothing to find. Then we decide what deserves a model and what just needed a database.
Selected work
Things I have shipped
Overseen or built directly, at Paper Crane.
Krown Rust Control
Over 300 independent dealers across North America, each of which used to want its own website. Now one headless platform generates every dealer microsite, in English and French, from a single content source. Bookings rose 40% year over year in peak season and traffic 50 to 60%.
Pancreatic Cancer North America
Two organisations, two websites and a message split between them. We merged the pair into one site organised around what patients, caregivers and donors actually arrive looking for, then handed the team a platform they can run themselves.
Hopewell Residential
Website and platform work for one of Calgary’s larger homebuilders: communities, home models, show home listings, and the enquiries that come off them.
Lake Louise
Online work for a destination whose traffic arrives in seasonal bursts. When a few thousand people hit the same page in the same hour, load time is the whole conversion funnel.
Kudos
Web platform work for the Calgary employee recognition company, running alongside their own product team rather than around it.
If the automation needs a person watching it, you have bought a chore with extra steps.
Robert Simmons