AI advisory & agent systems

AI strategy that ships.

RZ Innovation helps companies decide what to build with AI, then builds it. Ongoing advisory for teams that want a steady technical hand, and production platforms and agent systems delivered end to end.

Book an intro call See how I work

12 yrs

Software engineering

Solo by design

No handoff, no junior team

End to end

Strategy through delivery

Point of view

Fix the process first

workflow before automation

AI earns its keep when it improves a process that already makes sense. Every engagement starts with how work actually moves through the business, because the first fix is often the workflow itself. Automation comes after, aimed at the bottlenecks that cost the most. Your team stays at the center of the system and ends up stronger for it.

01 — Services

What I do

Three ways to work together, with pricing on the table from the start.

Advisory retainer — fractional AI lead

A senior technical partner on call every month. I own the AI roadmap, pressure-test vendor claims, make build-or-buy calls, and prototype when seeing beats debating. For leadership teams that need a trusted answer to "what should we actually do with AI."

Monthly roadmap ownership and architecture guidance
Vendor evaluation and build-vs-buy decisions
Working prototypes, delivered alongside the advice

Typical range $2,500–5,000/mo · 10–20 hrs/month

Platform & agent system builds

Design and implementation of production software: web platforms, customer portals, mobile-ready applications, and AI agent systems, built to fit your existing stack. I handle the architecture, integrations, guardrails, and observability, then hand the system to your team with documentation they can run on.

End-to-end design, build, and handoff
Integration with your current tools, APIs, and back-office systems
Production guardrails: error handling, human-in-the-loop controls

Pricing Scoped per project · priced by deliverable

Team workshops

Working sessions for research, operations, and engineering teams that need to get practical with AI quickly. Built around your real workflows rather than generic demos, and scoped so the team ships something during the session.

Half-day to multi-session formats
Hands-on: participants leave with working agent workflows
Fits institutional PD budgets and procurement

Starting at From $1,500

02 — Process

How I work

Discover

I start with your workflows. A focused audit maps where the team spends time, where decisions bottleneck, and where AI can make a measurable difference.

Design

You get a concrete architecture and implementation plan: what to build, what to buy, how to phase the rollout, and how to measure success. Blueprints your team can execute, without the 80-page deck.

Deliver

I stay hands-on through implementation, whether that means building the agent system, wiring it into your stack, or training your team on the new workflow. The work ships.

03 — Selected work

Selected work

A few representative engagements. Details anonymized by design.

Case study

AI-powered recommendation engine

A consumer brand ran an expert-led, in-person personalization service that worked beautifully and refused to scale. I built a recommendation engine that digitized that expertise: unified data pipeline, hybrid ML model, real-time serving, and an explanation layer so customers understood why a product was suggested.

Result 2,000+ interactions in 5 days and measurable lift in funnel conversion

Framework

AI developer workflow system

A structured agent system for integrating AI coding assistants into real codebases: repo conventions, multi-agent delegation across planning, implementation, and review, plus production guardrails. Feature planning dropped from half an hour to minutes.

Result Higher code quality, faster planning, and consistency that compounds

Roadmap

12-month AI adoption roadmap

A three-phase adoption plan for a mid-market brand, covering customer-facing AI, operations AI, and marketing AI. Every phase scoped, sequenced, and tied to the metric it was meant to move.

Result A board-ready plan the team could execute phase by phase, with success measures defined before any build

04 — About

About RZ Innovation

RZ Innovation is an independent AI practice, and it is deliberately small. The senior engineer you meet on the first call is the one who does the work: no account layer, no junior team, no handoff. Behind every engagement is twelve years of software engineering across recommendation systems, agent infrastructure, and production machine learning.

Sometimes the honest answer is that you don't need AI yet, and you'll hear that too. My deepest experience is in retail and consumer products, and the workflow-first method travels well into SaaS, education, research, and healthcare tech.

Prefer to evaluate the work first?

Field notes YouTube @thebuildingdad

05 — Contact

Start with a conversation

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, and each one starts with a 30-minute call. Bring the problem you're wrestling with, and you'll get an honest read on whether AI is the right move and what it would take.

Intro call · 30 minutes Book an intro call

richard.zepeda@rzinnovation.com