Ballast Group · AI consultancy for mid-sized businesses
Most companies don’t need more AI tools. They need someone to work out where AI genuinely pays for itself, build it properly, and take responsibility for keeping it safe once it’s running. That is the whole of what we do.
1
Tools get bought because AI is urgent, not because anyone measured what it should change.
We start with an assessment that names the work AI should take on, what it’s worth, and how we’ll know.
2
Staff won’t rely on answers they can’t check, and leadership won’t sign off on risks nobody can explain.
Every answer cites its source, every action is logged, and anything consequential waits for a person.
3
The pilot works, the consultant leaves, and six months later nothing has been updated or improved.
We don’t hand over and walk away. We run it, month after month, and answer for how it performs.
01
One firm, responsible from the first conversation to the thousandth automated task.
02
The work that is frequent, rule‑bound and text‑heavy, which describes a surprising amount of every business. For each, we’re specific about what stays with your people.
Drafts accurate replies from your help centre, policies and past tickets, so agents review and send rather than write from scratch.
Reads invoices and receipts, matches them to orders, and flags what doesn’t add up, before anyone has to key it in.
Prepares your team before every conversation and keeps the CRM current afterwards, so selling time is spent selling.
Answers “how do we do this?” from your own procedures, and moves information between systems that don’t talk to each other.
Gives every employee instant, consistent answers about policies and benefits, and makes onboarding feel organised.
Reviews contracts against your own playbook, pulls out key terms and obligations, and keeps track of what’s due when.
03
A single, private place where your company uses AI, governed by your rules and isolated from everyone else’s.
Your people
Your console one isolated environment per client
AI models
What your team sees: assistants for support, sales, operations, finance and HR; a knowledge base that answers from your own documents and cites its sources; and automations that do the routine work and ask before doing anything that matters.
What your administrators see: who can use what, what it costs, what it has done, and a switch to pause any assistant immediately. It carries your name, your logo and your domain.
04
These are commitments, not features. Each one is written into your agreement with us.
It is never used to train any model, ours or a provider’s. You can export or delete it at any time.
Each client runs in a separate environment with its own encryption keys. No shared databases.
TLS in transit, AES‑256 at rest, and secrets held in a managed vault.
Single sign‑on, multi‑factor authentication, and each assistant limited to the data its job requires.
Sensitive data is redacted before it reaches a model; injected instructions in documents and emails are detected and refused.
Sending, paying, deleting and changing records require human approval. You set where that line sits.
Every prompt, response and action is logged with who, what and when, and can be exported for audit.
Every change is evaluated against misuse, fabrication and data‑leak scenarios before your team sees it.
Our data processing agreement and security documentation are available on request, under NDA if you prefer.
05
You are never locked in. When you want more control, the console comes with you. We simply keep it running underneath.
| Question | Managed | Co‑managed | White‑label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who builds new assistants | We do | Your administrators, with our support | Your team |
| Hosting, security & updates | Us | Us | Us, behind the scenes |
| Name on the console | Yours | Yours | Yours alone; no mention of us anywhere |
| Offer it to your own customers | — | — | Yes |
| Best suited to | Getting started | Teams building in‑house skill | Companies ready to own their AI |
Each arrangement is a fixed monthly fee, quoted after assessment. Moving between them is planned together, with no rebuild and no downtime.
06
Deliberately unhurried at the start, so nothing is rushed once it matters.
Thirty minutes on your business and what you want from it. No charge, and you’ll leave with useful ideas either way.
A written roadmap: the opportunities we found, the risks we see, and what we recommend you do first.
One high‑value use case, live in your console with a small group, with every safeguard in place.
We extend it across teams and train your people to use it well and use it safely.
Monitoring, improvements, new use cases and a regular safety review, reported to you in plain language.
We started this firm because we kept seeing the same thing: capable businesses either avoiding AI out of caution, or adopting it with no one minding the risks. Neither is necessary. AI can be put to work carefully, and someone should be answerable when it is. We named the firm Ballast because ballast is the weight that keeps something steady under pressure. That’s the job we’ve chosen.
07
No. We build, host and run everything. If you later want your own people building systems, we’ll train them.
Consoles are designed so that AI proposes and people decide on anything consequential. Answers cite their sources, important actions wait for approval, everything is logged, and any system can be paused at once.
You can move to a white‑label arrangement and keep running the console under your own name, or export your data and configuration and leave. Either way, it belongs to you.
We choose among leading enterprise providers for each task, weighing quality, cost and your compliance requirements, and can change provider without you rebuilding anything.
Regulated businesses are often where careful AI helps most, because so much of the work is documentation. We design around your obligations from the assessment onward, and will tell you plainly if something shouldn’t be automated.
Assessments start at $3,500 and are credited against the build if you go ahead within 60 days. Managed plans start at $1,500 a month, with AI usage included up to a cap you set, so there are no surprise charges. Every plan runs for at least 12 months from launch day, because results build month by month.
US businesses with roughly 50 to 500 people, especially those with a lot of client communication and document work: accounting and law firms, insurance and benefits agencies, property managers, contractors and distributors. The systems are built around how your business already works, so the industry matters less than the shape of the work.
The assessment takes one to three weeks. After you sign, the build is planned to go live in about seven weeks: a week of setup and access, then building and testing, a one-week pilot with a small group, and training in the launch week.
No. Each client gets a private, isolated environment, we use enterprise AI services that do not train on customer data, and we connect only to the tools a task needs. You can export your data at any time, and if you leave we delete your environment and confirm it in writing.
Tell us a little about your business and we’ll arrange a thirty‑minute call. If you’d rather sign an NDA before discussing details, just say so.
Or write to us directly at hello@ballastgroup.ai