About
A small, senior firm built for the mid-market.
Firestarter helps PE-backed and mid-market companies work out where AI creates value for them, what it puts at risk, and what to fund first. The work runs as a six-week, fixed-price engagement and ends in a roadmap a board can invest behind.
What Firestarter does
One engagement, the AI Firestarter, takes a business unit, team, or location from curious about AI to ready to act. It covers exec and board AI literacy, a competitor benchmark of your AI maturity, policy and governance reviewed against the EU AI Act, the processes worth redesigning first, and, run with your IT team, your data and technology readiness. The five converge on a single deliverable: a board-ready AI roadmap.
Who it is for
Companies under investment, on a hold period measured in years, where the board expects a view on AI and the executive team has a hundred competing priorities. Typically that means a private-equity portfolio company or a mid-market business of similar shape, and the people who carry the work are usually the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer, and whoever owns risk.
How the firm is set up
Two partner-level people sit on every engagement for its full six weeks, so the team that scopes the work is the team that delivers it. The large firms lean on pyramids of junior consultants because their economics require it. Firestarter's economics do not, and staying focused on the mid-market is what keeps every team senior. There is no ambition to grow into a big-four practice, a systems integrator, or a sector boutique.
The combination that makes it work
Three kinds of expertise sit in the same people: what AI can and cannot do and where the value is real, the people-change experience to know that adoption is a change problem first, and enough business-domain knowledge to speak the language of your operations and your board. Each is findable on its own. Together, at this level of experience, they are rare, and the combination is what derisks AI adoption from the outset.
After the roadmap
The roadmap opens a managed path rather than ending the relationship. That means turning the plan into new ways of working function by function, tracking the value AI returns against what the roadmap promised, and refreshing the benchmark and the governance as the market and the regulation keep moving. Ember, the platform that pairs with each person by role and industry, is in pilot and rolling out to Firestarter clients first.
The guides
Firestarter publishes sourced answers to the questions risk, finance, and security leads are asking about AI. Every figure names where it came from and carries the month it was checked, because pricing and regulation both move quickly enough to go stale. Where the evidence is thin, the guide says so.
Get in touch
Firestarter engagements start with a call about scope, timing, and whether the fit is right. Email hello@aifirestarter.com, or read the insight guides first.