The questions every owner-manager asks about AI (and our honest answers).

No. Every automation we build runs on your own accounts — your own Zapier, Make, or vendor logins, your own API keys. Your data never passes through our infrastructure to begin with, so there's nothing of yours sitting on our servers to secure, lose, or hand over if we ever parted ways. If you leave us, you keep the whole thing — every account, every workflow, every record. That's structural security, not a promise you have to take on trust.

Three fixed fees, agreed in writing before we start:

The Audit — £1,500, fixed. One to two weeks. We identify three to five quantified opportunities and set them out in plain English, with the one worth starting first. The fee is credited in full against a subsequent build, and refunded entirely if we can't find three opportunities that would pay for themselves.

The Build — £3,000–£6,000, fixed per solution. Built and configured on your own accounts, live within weeks. One contained problem, properly solved — never a day-rate.

The Retainer — £450 a month. Ongoing monitoring, refinement and quarterly counsel. No lock-in, thirty days' notice whenever you wish.

Manufacturing and engineering firms in the West Midlands may also qualify for a Made Smarter grant of up to £20,000, match-funded at 50% — worth checking before any paid work.

The evidence from businesses already doing it says no. The British Chambers of Commerce asked SMEs using AI this exact question in March 2026 — 95% reported no change to headcount at all. What we build is meant to take repetitive work off a desk, not the person behind it, and every engagement is checked and signed off by a person before it reaches you.

No. Every system we build runs on accounts you control — your own subscriptions, held in your name, with running costs that vary by system (a missed-call answering agent on your own Twilio account, for example, is an estimated £20–£80 a month). There is no platform fee payable to us. If you leave, you keep the whole thing and could hand it to another consultant tomorrow, who would immediately see what's running and why. That's the opposite of lock-in — it's structural portability, not a promise we're asking you to trust.

It's a real and widely reported risk category — employees pasting confidential information into free consumer AI tools without anyone deciding that was acceptable. What we build addresses it structurally rather than by policy alone: automations run on your own governed accounts and vendor APIs, not through public consumer AI interfaces, so you set who can trigger them and what data flows through. Once a system is live, we brief your team on what it does and when to override it, so nobody is surprised by it later. It isn't "make it impossible to make a mistake" — that's fantasy. It's make it obvious, make it governed, make it your call.

That's precisely what the Audit is for. We spend one to two weeks looking at how your business actually runs and set out three to five quantified opportunities in plain English, with the one worth starting first made explicit. If we can't find at least three that would pay for themselves, the fee is refunded in full — no questions asked. That's our confidence in the process, not a marketing line.

Pathways Intelligence is led personally by Jacob Putt, who scopes, builds and signs off every engagement himself — there is no account manager and no offshore team. We're open about using AI to deliver the work; it's how we keep fees fixed and turnaround in weeks rather than months, and we'd far rather say so than pretend otherwise. Where a grant route exists — Made Smarter for manufacturing and engineering, for instance — we point it out before suggesting paid work.