Over the years I've built a handful of software tools to support my consulting work — Spans & Layers, Balanced Turnover, Combined Structure — each one growing out of a real engagement rather than a product plan. Together they became Simple Firms.
For a long stretch, I ran these as hosted SaaS applications: servers, uptime, security patches, the whole operating burden of production software. For a solo consultant with a full advisory practice on top of it, that overhead was excessive relative to what it actually bought me or my clients.
AI changed that calculus. It's let me maintain and modernize these tools largely on my own, without the overhead that used to require a team. In practice, I usually don't run them as an always-on hosted service anymore. I bring the software directly into an engagement, running it on my laptop with only the people who need to be in the room, when and where it's actually needed. When a client wants a hosted instance, that's still on the table.
It's a small example of a larger pattern: AI isn't replacing the judgment a consulting engagement requires, but it is letting one person's tools keep pace with what used to take a team.
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