FAQs
Have Questions?
What does an AI development engagement look like?
A typical engagement starts with two weeks of use case discovery and scoping. The middle four weeks are build, data integration, and testing. The last two weeks are adoption support: training the staff who use the tool, refining the prompts, and confirming the success criteria are met. The result is a working tool deployed in production, not a slide deck.
Do you build on top of ChatGPT or use other models?
Most CinchOps builds run on Azure OpenAI Service, which gives a Houston SMB access to the same underlying GPT models inside a Microsoft tenant the business already manages. We also build on Microsoft Copilot Studio, Anthropic Claude through Azure, and open models when the use case calls for them. The model choice follows the workflow, not the other way around.
What is retrieval-augmented generation?
Retrieval-augmented generation is the technique that lets an AI tool answer questions using a business's own documents. The tool searches the document set, pulls relevant passages, and uses those passages to ground its response. For an SMB, this is what turns a generic AI tool into one that knows the company's proposals, contracts, manuals, or knowledge base. Most useful SMB AI builds rely on this technique.
How much does an AI build cost?
AI development is scoped per engagement based on use case complexity, data integration work, and the tool stack. Most Houston SMB first-builds land in the range of a focused project rather than a multi-month consulting fee. The scoping conversation produces a fixed-scope, fixed-fee proposal before any build work starts. The proposal includes the success criteria that will be used to declare the build complete.
Will the AI tool replace staff?
Not in any SMB build CinchOps has delivered. The tools take the manual work out of document-heavy workflows so staff can spend time on judgment work: client conversations, technical review, exception handling. The Houston engineering firm proposal assistant case study is the pattern: principals got 10 hours of their week back per proposal, and they used the time on technical review they had been skipping.