Questions owners ask

Phronimos charges $999 for an Agent Reliability Review — a diagnostic that answers "is what you already built actually working?" — from $3,500 for an Agent Implementation Sprint that puts the first agent into production, and $5,000 per month for the Fractional AI Officer retainer (roughly one junior FTE, without the hire). The review fee is credited in full toward a sprint or the first month of a retainer. A first year covering the review, one sprint, and twelve months of retainer starts around $63,500. Scope changes are re-priced in writing before work continues.

A managed AI operator is a custom AI agent built for one specific job inside a business, connected to that business systems, bounded by explicit guardrails, and monitored by the firm that built it. The distinction from an AI tool is ownership: an operator has someone accountable for it continuing to work.

AI consulting typically ends at a recommendation. Phronimos runs the diagnosis, builds the agent, puts it into production, and stays accountable for it working afterward. The deliverable is a running system with a service standard behind it.

Building in-house makes sense when a business has an engineer who can own the system for the next two years. Most companies with 5 to 50 people do not, and the failure point is rarely the build. It is month four, when an upstream tool changes and nobody notices the automation stopped working.

The Agent Reliability Review is the paid diagnosis and the scoping document for what follows. A full Phronimos engagement runs review, then implementation sprint, then managed retainer. The review exists so the first build aims at the right workflow.

No. Clients approve outcomes and watch a shared request queue. Model selection, infrastructure, authentication, monitoring, and version control sit with Phronimos.

The best first candidates are high-volume, low-judgment, and easy to measure: inbox triage, meeting follow-up, lead intake and routing, document chase-ups, and repeated internal questions. Workflows specific to an industry come second, once the pattern is proven in that business.

A paid diagnosis keeps the engagement bounded and serious on both sides. Reviewing how work moves through a company, sizing what it costs, and scoping a build against it takes days of work, and pricing it that way means the findings get the attention they need. A free call tends to produce a list nobody owns.

Every Phronimos operator carries monitoring and failure alerts that route to Phronimos rather than to the client team. Automatic recovery runs where it is possible, escalation goes to a named person, and every incident ends in a written account of what happened and what changed.

The workflows, SOPs, and configurations built for a client business are documented and handed over, so the client is not locked in. Ownership terms are set out plainly in each statement of work before the work starts.

Phronimos never holds client passwords. System access runs through a managed authentication layer where the client admin completes every authorization directly with the source system, and access is scoped to the systems named in the statement of work. Each client gets an isolated authentication surface, and access is revoked when the engagement ends.

Not yet, by design. Phronimos currently works across several operator-heavy markets, including agencies, law firms, insurance teams, real estate teams, and recruiting firms, and will narrow where the pull is strongest. The universal workflows are close enough across these industries that the early lessons transfer.