AI Strategy Consulting
StepTo delivers AI strategy and implementation consulting from Serbia: LLM integration planning, ML feasibility studies, AI roadmaps, and build vs buy analysis.
Reviewed by Igor Gazivoda, Co-founder & CEO of StepTo · Updated
StepTo's AI strategy consulting answers a practical question: which AI use cases are worth your money, in what order, and with what technology. We run readiness assessments, feasibility studies, and build-vs-buy analyses, then implement the resulting roadmap with our own engineers, from LLM integrations and RAG systems to production ML pipelines, as part of our custom software development practice. Working from Serbia's 60,000-strong IT talent market at $35–75/hr for most delivery work, we make serious AI work affordable for mid-sized companies, not just enterprises.
What Does AI Strategy Consulting Include?
- AI readiness assessment: Audit of your data quality and accessibility, existing systems, and team skills, scored against candidate use cases, with a roadmap ranked by ROI and feasibility.
- Use-case discovery workshops: Structured sessions with department leads to surface automation and augmentation opportunities, filtered against cost and risk.
- Build vs buy vs API analysis: 24-month cost models comparing off-the-shelf tools, foundation-model APIs, and custom development per use case.
- LLM integration planning: Model selection (commercial APIs vs open-weight models), RAG architecture over your document and data estate, prompt and evaluation design, and inference-cost budgeting.
- Proof-of-concept development: A working pilot on your real data in 6–10 weeks, with measured accuracy and cost per transaction, evidence before investment.
- AI governance & compliance: GDPR-compliant data flows to model providers, EU AI Act risk classification, human-oversight design, and evaluation logging.
- MLOps & production planning: Deployment architecture, monitoring for drift and quality regression, and cost controls for systems that move beyond pilot.
Where Does AI Deliver ROI First?
- Document-heavy operations: Extraction and classification of invoices, contracts, claims, and compliance documents.
- Customer support: Draft responses, ticket triage and routing, and knowledge-base answering with human review.
- Internal knowledge access: RAG assistants over policies, project archives, and technical documentation.
- Sales & marketing operations: Lead enrichment, proposal drafting, and content production workflows.
- Forecasting & anomaly detection: Demand planning, churn scoring, and quality monitoring where historical data exists.
Which Engagement Model Fits Your AI Programme?
- Readiness assessment (3–5 weeks): Fixed fee, typically $10,000–25,000, ending in a costed roadmap. Rates $35–75/hr for most delivery work; see pricing.
- Proof of concept (6–10 weeks): One use case built on your data with measured results, typically $20,000–60,000.
- Dedicated AI team: From $13,500/month to industrialise successful pilots and work through the roadmap.
- Staff augmentation: ML and LLM engineers embedded with your team from $4,500/month per engineer.
Why Choose StepTo for AI Strategy?
- Strategy backed by delivery: Recommendations are written by people who will have to build them, which keeps roadmaps honest about effort and feasibility.
- Model-agnostic: We work across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-weight models (Llama, Mistral), choosing per use case on quality, cost, and data-residency grounds.
- Evidence over hype: Every pilot ships with an evaluation harness measuring accuracy and cost per transaction, so go/no-go decisions rest on numbers.
- European compliance context: GDPR and EU AI Act considerations are built into architecture decisions from the start.
How Does an AI Strategy Engagement Run?
- Discovery (week 1–2): Stakeholder interviews, data and systems audit, and a long-list of use cases.
- Prioritisation (week 3–4): Feasibility and ROI scoring; build/buy/API recommendation per short-listed use case.
- Roadmap delivery (week 5): Sequenced plan with budgets, governance requirements, and success metrics per initiative.
- Pilot (6–10 weeks): The top use case built and evaluated on real data.
- Scale: Production hardening, MLOps, and successive roadmap items under a dedicated team or staff augmentation.
What Do Executives Ask Before Committing to an AI Strategy?
- How much does AI strategy consulting cost?
- An AI readiness assessment, auditing your data, systems, and candidate use cases, and delivering a prioritised roadmap, typically costs $10,000–25,000 over 3–5 weeks. A proof of concept for one use case usually runs $20,000–60,000 over 6–10 weeks. Production implementation depends on scope but benefits from the same rate structure: StepTo engineers bill $35–75/hr for most delivery work, roughly 40–60% below Western European or US AI consultancies.
- How do you decide whether we should build, buy, or use an API?
- We compare three paths per use case: an off-the-shelf AI product, a solution assembled on foundation-model APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-weight models), and custom model training. For most business use cases, API-based solutions with retrieval (RAG) win on time-to-value and cost; custom training only pays off with proprietary data at scale or hard latency/cost constraints. The recommendation comes with a cost model covering licences, inference spend, and engineering effort over 24 months.
- What makes a good first AI use case?
- The best first projects have three properties: the task is high-volume and repetitive (document processing, support triage, report drafting), the data needed already exists in accessible systems, and an imperfect output is reviewable by a human rather than catastrophic. We deliberately steer first projects away from mission-critical automated decisions, the goal is a measurable win that builds organisational confidence and infrastructure for the harder use cases.
- How do you address AI governance, privacy, and the EU AI Act?
- The roadmap includes a governance track: data-protection review of what may be sent to which model providers (with EU-hosted or self-hosted options where required by GDPR), risk classification of use cases against the EU AI Act, human-oversight design for higher-risk workflows, and evaluation procedures that log and measure model behaviour before and after deployment.
- Can StepTo implement the strategy, not just write it?
- Yes, that is the point of working with an engineering firm rather than a pure advisory. The consultants who scope your roadmap are backed by engineers who build the pilots and production systems, through a fixed-scope project, staff augmentation from $4,500/month per engineer, or a dedicated AI team from $13,500/month. You are never handed a slide deck that another vendor must interpret.