AI & Digital Transformation
Your AI pilots aren't reaching the P&L. We fix that.
Ridgeline is a three-partner firm for mid-market companies tired of AI projects that never make it out of the lab. Partner-led. Six clients a year.
The Partnership — in numbers
- Partners
- 03 Senior operators. No juniors on your account.
- Clients / year Clients per year
- 06 Deliberate scarcity. Deeper work, fewer clients.
- Avg. engagement
- 14 wks From kickoff to live, in production.
- Established
- 2018 Eight years inside mid-market AI work.
Trusted by mid-market leaders shipping AI to production
- Northwind
- Halden & Co.
- VECTRA/INDUSTRIAL
- orenda.
- Lattice Foods
- KILN —
The Problem
Most AI pilots die in the lab. Here's why.
After eight years inside mid-market AI work, the same three failures show up on every diagnostic. Ours included — until we stopped working around them.
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01 Failure mode
The pilot was scoped to impress, not to ship.
A demo dataset, a clean notebook, a single happy-path workflow. The model performs. Then production hits it with edge cases nobody scoped, and the project dies in QA.
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02 Failure mode
Nobody owns the P&L line it was supposed to move.
The CTO sponsors it. The CFO doesn't trust it. Operations wasn't in the room. When the question becomes "what did this save us," there's nobody who can answer with a real number.
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03 Failure mode
The vendor handed off and disappeared.
The big firm sent partners to the pitch and analysts to the build. Six months in, the partners are gone, the analysts have rotated, and your team is reverse-engineering a slack channel of decisions nobody documented.
How we work
Three ways to bring us in.
Productized engagements. Real prices. Capped at six clients a year.
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01 / The Diagnostic The Diagnostic
6 weeks from $150,000
A fast audit of your current AI portfolio. We tell you what to kill, what to fix, and what to build next. You get a board-ready roadmap with numbers attached.
- Full portfolio audit
- Data and infrastructure review
- 18-month plan with EBITDA targets
- Board presentation, partner-delivered
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02 / The Transformation The Transformation
12–16 weeks from $400,000
End-to-end delivery of one or two priorities. Two partners on-site every week. We write the accountability into the contract.
- Two partners on-site weekly
- Data infrastructure and model build
- Operating model and change management
- Written P&L commitment
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03 / The Operating Partnership The Operating Partnership
6 or 12 months retainer
An ongoing relationship for companies that want us in the room across a longer arc. Three active partnerships at a time, no more.
- Quarterly on-site sessions
- Monthly strategy reviews
- On-call partner access
- Board and investor material review
The Approach
You get the partners. Not a deck factory.
Most consulting firms put partners on the logo and analysts on the work. We flipped it. Every engagement is run by one of three partners, on-site weekly, writing the work by hand. Fewer clients. Faster answers.
See how we workSelected work
Three engagements, three numbers.
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01 / 03
Northwind Materials · Manufacturing · Supply Chain
$34M back on the balance sheet in eleven months.
A $680M manufacturer had run fourteen disconnected pilots in eighteen months. We killed eleven and rebuilt the three that mattered.
Read the case study -
02 / 03
Fennhaven Health System · Healthcare · ED Operations
22% faster ED triage. 94% clinician adoption.
Three prior vendor-led projects had failed because clinicians wouldn't use the tools. We spent six weeks in the ED before writing any code.
Read the case study -
03 / 03
Welstrand Distribution · Distribution · Pricing
Pricing 40,000 SKUs by model instead of gut feel.
A PE-backed distributor pricing 40,000 SKUs by gut feel. We built the model and the operating rhythm around it.
Read the case study
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A website for partner-led consultancies and advisory firms: three fixed-fee engagements, case studies with the numbers that landed, partner bios, a monthly essay series and a contact form, for desktop and mobile. A Figma design system and an Astro site wired to Sanity CMS.