AI implementation · automation · ops

AI that earns its keep. For teams without a sprawling eng org.

We’re a small outfit that wrangles AI into the messy reality of your business — quotes, invoices, inboxes, CRM, the spreadsheet nobody wants to own. No moonshots. Just shipped automations, measured in hours saved per week.

14dFrom kickoff to first live workflow
10–80hrReclaimed per team, per week
$0If month one doesn’t pay for itself
Stack we bring to the rodeo
What we do

Four ways we put AI to work — and nothing else.

We say no to a lot. No chatbot widgets you don’t need. No “AI strategy decks.” Every engagement ends with something running in production, with a dashboard you actually check.

01 / SERVICE

AI workflow automation

Turn the email-spreadsheet-CRM shuffle into a single pipeline. Quotes, intake, invoicing, scheduling, reporting — wired to your tools.

  • Email & doc parsing
  • CRM + accounting sync
  • Approvals in Slack / Teams
  • Audit log + rollback
02 / SERVICE

Custom AI agents

Purpose-built copilots that live inside your existing tools. Not chat-with-PDF — agents that take action with guardrails.

  • Sales / support / ops agents
  • Internal & customer-facing
  • Eval harness before launch
  • Human-in-the-loop by default
03 / SERVICE

Data plumbing & RAG

The unsexy work that makes the other stuff possible. Clean ingest pipelines, semantic search, and a knowledge base your team actually trusts.

  • Ingest from anywhere
  • Vector + keyword hybrid
  • Permissions & PII handling
  • Freshness monitoring
04 / SERVICE

Fractional AI lead

On retainer when you don’t need a full hire. We sit in your standups, own the roadmap, and ship in your codebase.

  • 8–20 hrs / week
  • Roadmap + execution
  • Vendor + model selection
  • Team upskilling
How we work

Two weeks to first value. Forever to perfect.

We move on a fixed cadence so you can plan around it. The first sprint always ships something live — even if it’s small. We build trust the same way we build software: incrementally.

Step 01

Saddle up

A working session to map your real workflows. We leave with 3 candidate automations scored on ROI, effort, and risk.

Week 1 · free
Step 02

First ride

We build the highest-ROI automation end-to-end. Lives in your stack, runs on real data, with a dashboard for hours-saved.

Weeks 2–3
Step 03

Expand the range

Roll out 2–4 more workflows. Set up an eval harness. Train the team to operate, tune, and add prompts themselves.

Months 2–3
Step 04

Hand the reins

Switch to a lightweight retainer or full handoff. Your team owns it. We’re a Slack message away when something breaks.

Month 4+
Receipts

The number that matters is hours, not hype.

42hr
Average weekly hours reclaimed per team after sprint 2
14d
From kickoff to a workflow you can show your boss
93%
Of automations still running 6 months post-handoff
3.4x
Median ROI in month one across 27 engagements
▌ Case · regional HVAC distributor

“We were drowning in RFQ emails. Dev Cowboy built us a quote-drafting agent in three weeks that handles 80% of incoming requests before a human touches them. My team gets to do real work again.”

35min
Average quote time, before
47s
Average quote time, after
+$184k
Net-new revenue in Q1 (faster turnaround)
2FTE
Redirected from quoting to field sales
Engagement models

Honest pricing. No retainers that outlive their usefulness.

Pick what fits the shape of the problem. Move between tiers as your needs change — quarterly check-ins on whether you still need us at all.

Pilot
$8.5kflat / one sprint
One automation, end to end. Best for testing the waters.
  • Discovery + scoping workshop
  • One workflow live in production
  • Dashboard + handoff docs
  • 14-day delivery guarantee
  • 30-day post-launch support
Start a pilot
Fractional
$12k/ mo · 3 mo min
Embedded AI lead. We’re part of your team until we’re not.
  • ~16 hrs / week dedicated
  • Roadmap ownership
  • In your codebase + standups
  • Hiring help when you’re ready
  • Cancel any time after month 3
Embed us
[ founder photo ]
Jordan Hale
Founder · Dev Cowboy
Why Dev Cowboy

Big-firm AI consulting is built for big firms.

I spent eight years shipping ML systems at companies you’ve heard of. Then I watched a friend who runs a 40-person logistics shop get quoted $400k and twelve months by a name-brand consultancy — to do what amounted to a few automations and a knowledge base.

Dev Cowboy is what I wish he could have hired. Senior practitioners. Fixed-scope sprints. Code that lives in your repo, not behind an NDA. We work with companies between 10 and 500 people — too big to ignore AI, too lean for a six-month engagement to make sense.

Get the playbookRead more on the blog →
FAQ

Questions we get on every first call.

Do you replace my team or work alongside them?+
Alongside. We’re explicit about this in the kickoff: every workflow we build has a human owner on your side from day one. Our job is to make them faster, not redundant.
What does the "money back" guarantee actually mean?+
For Pilot engagements, if the first live workflow doesn’t demonstrably save more hours per month than the project cost, you get the difference refunded. We’ve refunded twice in 27 engagements.
Will our data be used to train models?+
No. We default to API access on enterprise tiers that exclude your data from training (OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock). Self-hosted Llama / Mistral is on the table when compliance demands it.
We’re a small team without engineers. Can we still hire you?+
Yes — about a third of our clients have zero in-house engineering. We handle the build and hand you a no-code-style admin panel. The Pilot tier exists for exactly this.
Which industries do you work with?+
We’re tool-agnostic and industry-flexible. Most of our work has been in B2B services, distribution, professional services, and SaaS. We’ll tell you honestly if your problem isn’t one we’re good at.
What if we just want advice, not someone to build?+
The first 60-minute call is always free. After that, we offer paid AI audits ($3.5k) that produce a written roadmap you can hand to any vendor — including ones that aren’t us.
Let’s ride

Twenty minutes. One call.
Walk away with a plan either way.

We’ll look at one workflow you hate, sketch what an automation would look like, and tell you straight if it’s worth doing. No deck. No follow-up sequence.