Questions people ask before reaching out.

Switchback AI Advisory is an independent AI consulting practice. I help leadership teams plan, govern, and roll out AI inside their everyday employee workflows. I don't sell software and I don't take vendor referral fees, so the guidance is built around your outcome, not a product quota.

It means I have nothing to sell you and no financial relationship with any AI tool or platform. When I recommend a tool or a workflow, the only thing driving the recommendation is what fits your team, your data, and your risk tolerance.

Engagements start hourly with a low-commitment way to begin. From there, work often grows into fixed-scope assessments or a monthly retainer. The AI Visibility Audit starts at $500 flat. Rates for other services are shared on an intro call once I understand what you're trying to do.

I work with leadership teams at small and mid-market companies, with deep specialties in sales and go-to-market organizations and in education and edtech. I'm based in Park City, Utah, and work remotely with clients across the Mountain West and nationwide.

I build. Alongside the strategy I can design and wire up the actual automations and pilots myself, so you get working systems, not just a slide deck and a bill. You own everything I build.

It depends on scope. An AI Strategy Session is a single call. A Readiness Assessment runs two to four weeks. A full governance framework and rollout is typically two to three months. The AI Visibility Audit is one week. Most clients move to a monthly retainer after the initial project.

That's exactly what the Readiness and Opportunity Assessment answers. It maps where AI realistically fits your operations, what's a quick win, and what's a risk — without assuming you need to buy anything specific to get there.

An AI acceptable use policy tells your employees which tools they're allowed to use, what company or customer data can and can't be entered into those tools, and what decisions require a human in the loop. If your employees are using ChatGPT or any other AI tool at work — and they almost certainly are — you need one. Without it you have no control over what data leaves your organization.

Shadow AI is the AI tools your employees are already using without your knowledge or approval. A shadow AI audit surfaces what's actually being used across your organization, assesses the risk, and brings it under policy rather than banning it outright. Most companies are surprised by how much shadow AI exists.

The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is the US government's neutral, widely adopted standard for managing AI risk. It's organized into four functions: Govern, Map, Measure, and Manage. Switchback uses it as the backbone of all governance work because it's vendor-neutral, well-documented, and increasingly expected by enterprise clients and regulators.

Before the rollout, we establish baseline metrics for the workflows being changed — time spent, error rates, output volume, whatever is relevant. After rollout, we measure against that baseline. The Adoption and ROI Review closes the loop and produces a concrete before-and-after comparison you can show stakeholders.

Adoption fails when tools are rolled out without role-specific training, without clear guidance on what's allowed, and without a visible win early on. The approach that works: start with a contained pilot in one team, build prompt libraries and playbooks so employees have a starting point, and run training that shows them time saved in their specific job — not a generic AI demo.

AI assistants pull recommendations from a mix of sources: structured business data, review platforms, your website's content and markup, and citations from credible third-party sites. If any of those layers are weak or missing, AI models either don't know you exist or don't have enough confidence to recommend you. The AI Visibility Audit identifies exactly which layers are the problem.

Google SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. AI search visibility optimizes for being cited as a recommendation when someone asks a question. Only 45% of businesses that lead in traditional local search also appear in AI recommendations (SOCi 2026). Ranking on Google does not mean AI recommends you. The signals AI engines weight — review volume and recency, structured data, consistent business information, and direct citations — are different from the signals Google's link algorithm uses.

An AI visibility audit tests how your business appears when real customer questions are asked across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. It produces a side-by-side view of how you and your competitors show up, identifies the specific gaps causing you to be invisible or underrepresented, and delivers a prioritized fix list. Switchback's audit is $500 flat and takes one week.

Technical fixes like structured data and directory consistency take effect within a few weeks as AI engines re-crawl your content. Review volume builds over months. The full compounding effect typically takes three to six months — which is why starting now matters. The fix accumulates slowly, so businesses that start early end up significantly ahead of those that wait.

Partially. Some AI engines pull from search indexes, so being indexed and having authoritative content helps. But the SOCi 2026 Local Visibility Index found that 55% of businesses leading in traditional local search do not appear among the most recommended in AI results. Google ranking is a floor, not a ceiling. AI visibility requires its own distinct work.

The four factors that matter most: a website with clear, well-structured content AI can parse; consistent and accurate business information across the directories AI pulls from; a strong and recent review presence on Google and industry-specific platforms; and third-party mentions on credible sites. The AI Visibility package addresses all four in sequence.