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Basil Kakis
Basil Kakis
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30 minutes · No pitch deck

Running in 90 days · You keep your team

Get more done without
hiring more people.

We find the jobs eating the most hours in your business — the paperwork, the scheduling, the chasing, the data entry — and build AI that handles them. You keep your people. They stop spending the day on work a computer should be doing.

Book a free 30-minute review

30 minutes, no sales deck. You leave with a written list of what to automate first — free, whether you hire us or not.

Illustration: a freight damage claim being settled from start to finish without a person — the claim arrives, the attached paperwork is read, the carrier contract is checked, liability is worked out, the amount is checked against the auto-settlement limit, and the claim is paid with a full record kept.
Sound familiar?

The jobs quietly eating your week.

Most businesses lose the same hours in the same few places. If two or three of these describe your week, there is almost certainly a case for fixing them — and we can put a number on it in thirty minutes.

  • The phone rings and nobody picks up.

    Every missed call is somebody who calls the next name on the list instead.

    What changes:

    Every call answered and every message sorted — at 9pm, on a Sunday, during your busiest hour.

  • Quotes take three days to go out.

    By the time yours arrives, they have already said yes to someone else.

    What changes:

    A priced, written-up quote ready within minutes of the enquiry, for you to check and send.

  • The same details get typed into three different systems.

    It is not hard work. It is just hours of it, every single day, forever.

    What changes:

    Entered once. It shows up everywhere else on its own, without the copy-paste mistakes.

  • Half the week goes on chasing people for paperwork.

    The missing form, the unsigned document, the photo they promised on Monday.

    What changes:

    It asks, waits, and asks again — politely, on schedule — until the thing actually arrives.

  • Nobody can remember what was agreed with that customer.

    It is in an email from two years ago, sent by somebody who has since left.

    What changes:

    Ask in plain English, get the answer, and see the exact document it came from.

  • No-shows and last-minute cancellations.

    An empty slot you had no chance to fill, and you paid your staff to sit through it.

    What changes:

    Confirms, reminds, reschedules, and offers the gap to your waiting list before it goes cold.

  • Invoices go out late, so the money comes in late.

    The job finished two weeks ago. The paperwork is what is holding up your cash.

    What changes:

    The invoice goes out the moment the job is marked done, then chases itself until it is paid.

  • The same twenty questions, over and over.

    Your most experienced people answering things a first-week hire could handle.

    What changes:

    Answered straight away, in your own words, and passed to a person the moment it is unusual.

Not on the list? The first call is where we find yours

What we build

What actually changes for you.

Most clients start with the plan and move into a build. Everything is a fixed price for an agreed scope, and it ends with something actually running in your business.

6–10 weeks02

The repetitive work starts doing itself

Same volume going out. Nobody touching it.

The jobs that eat your team's day — taking the request, checking it, entering it, chasing whatever is missing — start happening on their own. The AI reads it, does it, and only pulls in a person for the ones that are genuinely unusual.

  • Handles the whole job, not one step of it
  • Hard limits on what it is allowed to do on its own
  • Anything unusual goes to a person, with the work already done
  • A full record of every decision it made
6–8 weeks03

Nobody has to go hunting for answers

Ask a question, get the answer, see where it came from.

Your team stops interrupting each other to ask where something is or what was agreed with a customer two years ago. They ask in plain English and the answer comes straight out of your own contracts, emails, and files — with a link to the exact page, so they can check it themselves.

  • Answers pulled straight from your own documents
  • Every answer links to the page it came from
  • People only see what they already have access to
  • Works in Slack, Teams, or inside your own tools
2 weeks01

You find out where the money is actually going

Before anything gets built, you get the numbers.

Most owners know something is slow. Very few can say what it costs them. We watch how the work really gets done and put a dollar figure against each job — so you can see which ones are worth fixing, and which ones you should leave alone.

  • What each job costs you today, in hours and dollars
  • A ranked list of what to fix first, with the saving on each
  • A straight answer on what to build, buy, or leave alone
  • A 90-day plan, in the order we would do it
Ongoing04

It still works a year from now

The part everyone else skips.

Most of these projects quietly rot once the people who built them move on. We watch quality, speed, and cost on a dashboard so you can see it is still working rather than hope it is — and when the underlying technology changes, which it does a few times a year, we handle it before you notice anything.

  • Automatic checks that catch mistakes early
  • A dashboard showing quality, speed, and spend
  • An alert the moment answers start slipping
  • We handle the updates when the technology changes
The problem

The demo always works.
That is never where it falls apart.

Anyone can show you something impressive in a demo. The trouble starts when it meets your actual files, your actual rules, and the people who have to use it every day. That is where most of this work quietly stalls — and it is almost never the AI that is the problem. It is everything around it.

“The model was never the hard part.”
Every technical review we have ever run
  • The last 90%

    It works once, not every day

    Handling the easy cases is about a tenth of the job. The other nine tenths is what happens when a file is missing, who is allowed to see what, what it does when it is unsure, and how a person takes over. That is the part most firms leave to you.

  • No before picture

    Nobody measured what it cost to begin with

    If you never measured how long the job took before, you cannot show that it got better after. Projects get cancelled all the time — not because they failed, but because nobody could prove they worked.

  • Left behind

    Whoever built it is long gone

    A firm delivers, invoices, and moves on. Six months later something changes, nobody updates it, the answers slowly get worse, and your team quietly stops using it.

  • Wrong job first

    You automated the wrong thing

    The job that looks most impressive is rarely the one costing you the most. The real money is usually sitting in something boring and repetitive that nobody thinks to mention.

The short version

How it works, if you want to know.

Every system we ship has these six layers. The demo everyone else shows you is layer three on its own — which is exactly why it works in the demo and nowhere else.

Layer 02

It looks things up

Out of your files, not out of thin air

It pulls the relevant details out of your own contracts, records, and history — and keeps a link to the exact page it took each one from. It also respects who is allowed to see what, so nobody gets shown a file they could not already open.

Typical components
  • Searches your own files
  • Keeps the source link
  • Respects permissions
  • Finds the best match
How it works

Ninety days from first call to working.

No discovery phase that bills for four months. Something real is running in your environment by week four — and you can see the code the whole way.

  1. 01Day 0 · Free

    The call

    Thirty minutes on how your business actually runs day to day. You leave with a ranked list of what is worth automating and an honest answer on what is not — whether or not you hire us.

    You getYour list, ranked
  2. 02Weeks 1–2

    The plan

    We measure what the job costs you right now: how often it happens, how long it takes, how often it has to be redone, and what that adds up to in a year. Then we design the fix and commit to a number we will be held to.

    You getA fixed price and a number to beat
  3. 03Weeks 3–10

    The build

    You see working software every two weeks, not status updates. Something real is running in your business by week four. You review the actual thing, not slides about the thing.

    You getWorking software, in use
  4. 04Ongoing

    What is next

    We hand over the code — you own it outright — and train your team to run it. Then we go find the next job worth automating. The second one is always cheaper than the first, because the hard parts are already built.

    You getCode you own, a trained team, the next plan
Build the business case

What is doing it by hand costing you?

Model the annual cost of one repetitive process. Most teams are surprised by the number — it is usually buried across a dozen budget lines and never totalled.

Your process

12

Everyone who touches the process, including part-time.

14 hrs

Time spent on the repetitive portion, not their whole role.

$58

Salary plus benefits, tooling, and overhead — not base pay.

60%

We typically find 55–75% on document-heavy operational work.

Modelled annual impact

$268,934

Recoverable cost, per year

Hours reclaimed
4,637
Payback period
3.8 months
Three-year net value
$721,803
Check these numbers with us

A rough estimate only. It assumes 46 working weeks a year and a $85,000 build, which is typical. Your real numbers come from measuring your actual work during the planning stage, and they are often quite different from this.

The alternatives

You have four options. Honestly:

We are not the right answer for every situation. Here is where we win, and where you should genuinely pick something else.

How Basil Kakis compares with big consultancies, an in-house build, and freelancers across eight criteria.
CriterionBasil KakisBig consulting firmHiring in-houseFreelancers
Something working within 90 daysActually running, not a plan for laterYesNoNoSometimes
One agreed price, agreed up frontIf it runs over, that is our problemYesNoNoSometimes
They measure what it cost you beforeSo you can prove it worked, not just say soYesSometimesNoNo
You get the tools to check quality yourselfA number you can look at, not a feelingYesNoSometimesNo
The senior people stay on your projectNobody gets swapped for a junior after kickoffYesNoYesYes
You own everything they buildNothing you have to keep rentingYesSometimesYesYes
It survives the person who built it leavingWritten down, tested, handed over properlyYesYesNoNo
The cheapest hourly rate you can findWe are honestly not thisNoNoYesYes

If cheapest hourly rate is the deciding factor, hire a freelancer — that is genuinely the right call, and we will say so on the call. We are worth it when the process is expensive enough that shipping it correctly matters more than shipping it cheaply.

Where we work

Businesses buried in paperwork, mostly.

The pattern repeats across industries: high-volume work where a trained person reads something, checks it against rules, and makes a routine decision. That is where the money is — and where the technology is genuinely ready.

  • Financial Services

    Reviewing deals, checking clients, matching records

  • Healthcare

    Insurance approvals, billing codes, patient notes

  • Logistics

    Damage claims, problem shipments, tracking updates

  • Insurance

    New claims, policy checks, recovering costs

  • Legal

    Reading contracts, pulling out key terms, case research

  • Manufacturing

    Quality reports, quotes, maintenance records

  • Software

    Support tickets, setting up new customers, spotting cancellations

  • Professional Services

    Proposals, research, staffing projects

The awkward questions

The questions we get every time.

If yours is not here, ask it on the call. We would rather find out early that we are not a fit than sell you something that does not work.

How are you different from a big consulting firm?

Three ways. The people on your calls are the ones who write the software — there is no separate sales team handing you off. We quote a fixed price for an agreed scope, so if it takes longer than we thought, that is our problem and not your invoice. And we will tell you when something is not worth building, which is very hard for a firm that gets paid by the hour.

Our records are a mess. Do we need to sort that out first?

No. Anyone telling you to spend two years tidying your data before touching AI is selling you a two-year tidying project. We work with what you have, start where it is already good enough, and tell you which specific gaps are actually worth fixing — with the value of fixing them attached.

Where does all of this run?

On your own accounts, under your own security, always. You own the software and the setup from day one. We are not a platform — there is nothing you get locked into and nothing you have to keep renting from us.

Which AI do you use?

Whichever one is best for the job, and we assume that will change. We test the options against your actual work and pick on accuracy, speed, and cost — often a mix of several inside the same system. It is built so that switching to a better one later is a settings change, not a rebuild.

How do you handle security and privacy?

Ask us on the call and you will get a specific answer for your setup rather than a badge. As a rule we build inside your own accounts, take access only to what a piece of work actually needs, and log every request the software makes so you can see what it did. Whatever your industry requires in writing gets agreed before any work starts, and we will tell you plainly which agreements and controls we can put in place and which we cannot.

What if it does not work?

The planning stage exists so neither of us finds out late. Before a build starts we agree in writing what success looks like, how it will be measured, and what happens if it is not reached. Ask for that in writing before you sign anything, with us or with anyone else. A firm that will not put it in the contract is telling you something.

How quickly can we start?

The first call usually happens within a week, and planning starts within two weeks of signing. We deliberately limit how many clients we take on at once, so the senior people stay on your project instead of being swapped out for juniors after the kickoff.

Who owns what you build?

You do, completely, including while we are still building it. It goes into your accounts from the first day. No license fees, no ongoing royalties, and nothing proprietary you have to keep paying for.

Ask us directly
Book a free review

Find out what all this is actually costing you.

Tell us a little about the process on your mind. We will come to the call having already thought about it, with a point of view on whether it is worth automating — including when the honest answer is no.

  • Thirty minutes, one call

    We talk about how your business actually runs. No sales pitch.

  • You leave with the list

    A ranked list of what to automate first, yours to keep whether or not you hire us.

  • You talk to whoever would build it

    Not a salesperson. Nobody hands you off to a team you have never met once you sign.

What happens to the details you send is set out in our privacy policy.

Prefer email? contact@highcrestai.com