About
The pilot-to-production translator.
Isochrone Consulting is an independent, AI-native consultancy for mid-sized enterprises - the firms big enough to have run their first AI pilots and to feel the day-two problems, but too lean to hand it all to one of the big firms.
The pattern is the same almost every time: an impressive proof of concept, a stalled hand-over, and no route to production that anyone owns. We close that gap. We bring the delivery and governance discipline of large-scale enterprise IT to AI programmes, so the work ships and keeps shipping.
The firm is led by practitioners who spent 15+ years delivering enterprise IT and large-scale platform programmes inside major organisations - the kind of environments where “it works on my machine” is the start of the problem, not the end. We are not a model vendor and we are not a generalist. Our edge is knowing how enterprises actually buy, adopt, stall on, and defend the value of the systems they run - which is a commercial and governance problem, not a technical one.
What that costs is published rather than quoted on request: what the engagements are, and what they cost.
The name
An isochrone is a line joining everywhere you can reach in the same amount of time.
Not distance - time. Draw one around a station and you get a wobbly shape, never a circle, because the roads, the rivers and the traffic decide what is actually reachable.
It is drawn from where you are, over the ground you have got. Two organisations the same notional distance from the same outcome have completely different isochrones - one has clear ownership, usable data and a route through governance, and the other has a swamp.
That is the whole job: showing you what is genuinely within reach, and then getting you there.
What we believe
A technology isn’t a transformation.
Installing the tool is the easy ten per cent. The decisive, unglamorous work - process redesign, role changes, governance, the operating model, proving the value so the budget survives - is what actually delivers, and the part everyone skips. Everything we do reinforces that one idea.
Versus the alternatives
There are three other kinds of firm you could call. Sometimes you should.
We sit in a thin middle - independent of the supply side, but close enough to delivery to be useful once the decision is made. Here is the honest version of the field, including where each of the others beats us.
The large consultancies and systems integrators
- Good at:
- Enormous capacity, every discipline in house, and a brand that makes the decision defensible to a board.
- Where it breaks:
- The money is in the build and the run, so the advice about what to build is never entirely disinterested. Their minimums are also sized for organisations several times larger than the ones we work with, which is how a single well-defined problem ends up inside a programme.
- Call them instead if:
- You are running a multi-year, multi-country transformation and you need hundreds of people on it.
Strategy-only advisers
- Good at:
- Genuinely good at framing the question, sizing the prize, and getting a leadership team to agree on an ambition.
- Where it breaks:
- The engagement ends at the recommendation. What arrives is a document, and the work that decides whether AI pays - the operating model, the ownership, the adoption, the measurement - starts the day after they leave.
- Call them instead if:
- You have the delivery capability already and what you are missing is the direction.
Technical boutiques and build shops
- Good at:
- Fast, genuinely capable engineers who will get something working sooner than anyone else in this table.
- Where it breaks:
- They build well and land badly. Governance, change, role redesign, integration into the systems people actually work in, proving the value afterwards - that is where AI programmes die, and it is not what they are for or how they are priced.
- Call them instead if:
- The problem is genuinely technical, you own the change side yourself, and you know what you want built.
And three jobs that are not ours
- You want the cheapest possible build. We are not priced for that, and one of the boutiques will serve you better.
- You want a keynote about where AI is going. We are a delivery and governance practice, and there are better speakers.
- You want someone to own an outcome while somebody else controls the delivery. That is blame without control, and we will decline it.
Who we work with
UK mid-market and small enterprise, roughly £30m-£1bn turnover, in sectors where AI still needs translating into business outcomes. Deliberately not the AI-native firms who already speak it fluently - they don’t need a translator.
Have us do it
Work with a named senior lead. Most of it is fixed-scope with a number agreed before it starts, from a short opportunity map up to a full build; the standing seat on your steering group is a monthly retainer instead, which you can stop. This is where the turnover band above applies - the engagements are sized for organisations with an estate to assess.
See the engagements and what they cost →Run it yourself
The same method, codified, for anyone who would rather run it than hire someone to run it. No turnover bar and no call required. The newsletter and the free Scorecard are open now; the template and playbook library is on a waitlist.
See the self-serve route →We work well with
- Mid-sized enterprises with real AI ambition and a stall between pilot and production.
- Leaders who want the value proven to whoever funds it, not just a working demo.
- Organisations ready to change the operating model, not only buy a tool.
- Solo operators and small teams who want the same method self-serve, rather than a delivery team.
We are not a fit for
- Teams looking for the cheapest build, or a body-shop to write code.
- Programmes with no executive sponsor and no appetite for governance.
- Anyone wanting an AI-hype keynote rather than delivery discipline.
Still the right kind of firm for you?
Thirty minutes, free, and we will tell you honestly if one of the others above is the better call.