About
A firm that finishes, and then gets out of the way.
Most AI work is structured so the client never learns how it was done. This is built the other way round.
What that changes
The usual arrangement is profitable precisely because it does not transfer.
A system nobody inside can maintain becomes a support contract. Good outcome for the firm that built it, dead end for the team that has to live with it.
| The usual shape | Ours | |
|---|---|---|
| Who builds it | A delivery team you never meet, working from a brief. | Your people, with us next to them. |
| What you get | A system you own on paper and cannot change. | A system your team has already modified once, while we watched. |
| What happens after | A support retainer, because nobody inside can maintain it. | Nothing. That is the point. |
| How success is judged | The project shipped. | The number you baselined moved, and your team can say why. |
How the firm is built
Every constraint here exists to keep that from quietly reversing.
- Deliberately small
- The value is in sitting with the person who runs a process and understanding why it is shaped the way it is. That does not survive being handed to a delivery team, and adding people to the room does not improve it.
- Few engagements at once
- Each one narrow enough to finish. If we are the wrong size for what you need, better to say so early than staff up to win the work.
- Built in your accounts
- Your infrastructure, your vendor contracts, your credentials. We take no margin on model spend, so the cost stays visible and the dependency stays yours.
- Measured against your own numbers
- What the work costs before we touch it, and after. You sign off on the baseline, which means you can also disagree with the result.
- We turn work down
- No strategy documents as a deliverable. Nothing where the process owner has not agreed it needs changing. Nothing where the underlying process is broken in a way AI does not fix.
Who does the work
The person you meet is the person who does it.
You have been sold by a partner and delivered to by a graduate before. Being this small is what makes that impossible.
Setanta is Gary O’Neill. He has led business systems, data and AI transformations at Catalant, Stylitics, Sony and Machinery Partner: operating roles that owned the systems a company runs on, rather than advising on them from outside.
That is most of the reason an engagement here is shaped this way. Someone who has had to keep these systems running after the consultants left tends to build them so the next person can.
The name
Setanta.
Setanta means “He who knows the path” in Gaelic. It is the boyhood name of Cú Chulainn, who takes on the job the household already had because the work needed doing and he was the one standing there.