Questions we get.

Strategy, transformation, and execution, run end to end by the people who build it. We assess where money and time go, set the direction, rewire the ways of working, train your team, ship the build that runs it in production inside thirty to ninety days, and prove the number moved against a dated baseline. Two disciplines run the whole way through: change leadership (organizational change management, sponsorship, AI training, adoption) and proving it. Most AI work fails in the rewire, not in the model.

Small and mid-sized businesses, roughly 10 to 500 people. Three industries fit best: professional services (10-200), SaaS and tech startups (10-100), and manufacturing, industrial, or engineering firms (50-500). Sub-10 is past it before we finish the intake call. 500-plus has a different problem set than the one we are built to solve.

Most AI work dies in the gap between the strategy deck and the running system. The strategy firm leaves before anything ships. The platform vendor ships a tool and leaves the business unchanged around it. Alpen does all three: strategy, the transformation of how the work gets done, and the build that proves it, with one accountable owner for the number on the statement.

Phil Howard. Seventeen-plus years in tech leadership, including technology implementation and operating-model change at a Fortune 20 retailer, high-growth tech, and government agencies. Nuclear and mechanical engineering training before the tech career. Builds production AI infrastructure daily. The founder signs every page of every deliverable.

No. A boutique practice, not an agency. No account managers or junior teams between you and the work. The people you talk to are the people who build it, lead the change, and sign the readout. Today that is principally Phil Howard; as the practice grows it adds senior people who work the same way, never a layer between you and the work.

No. Sometimes the answer is an agent or a pipeline. Sometimes it is a script, a workflow redesign, or a conversation the team needed to have. Sometimes the right call is to stop doing the work entirely. We do not sell a stack. We solve the problem with whatever moves the number.

Conversation first. Scoped engagement second. Ship and measure third. Most engagements run thirty to ninety days from kickoff to a first production cut. If the first ship is not in production, the engagement failed regardless of the readout.

It is organizational change management (OCM), built in, not tacked on at the end. Named sponsorship, manager enablement, AI training, honest communication about what is changing and what is not, resistance handled early, and reinforcement after go-live. It runs across the whole engagement: buy-in during strategy, retraining during transformation, adoption during execution. A model nobody uses is a line item, not a result, so we lead the adoption in the room.

Yes. Training and enablement are core, not an add-on. We train your team to operate and extend what we build, from a hands-on basecamp for the whole group to a small advanced cohort that goes deep on building with AI. The aim is fluency that outlasts the engagement, so your own people run the higher-value work. We also deliver training on its own, separate from a build.

No. You pay your own vendor invoices at cost. No markup, no kickbacks, no preferred-vendor arrangements that bend the recommendation. The recommendation is whatever fits your problem.

Yours. We index against your sources and retrieve from your infrastructure. Nothing leaves your environment to live in ours. You own the data, the tools, and the indexes. Exit is a feature, not a scary event.

Yes. Standard mutual NDA before any meaningful detail crosses. Your paper or ours, either works.

Valid outcome. We tell you plainly, with a pointer to what to fix first. About half of intake calls do not turn into a scoped engagement, and we tell you that on the call.