AI Strategy & Consulting
We don't sell AI. We find the hour a day it should be saving you.
We look at how your business actually runs — the handoffs, the repeat questions, the five-minute jobs that happen fifty times a week — then build the one AI agent that fixes the part that's actually broken.
No pitch deck, no priced "strategy session" — just a proper look at what's going on.
Sound familiar?
You've read the AI headlines. You still don't know what it means for you.
"Someone on the team is retyping the same information into three different systems every day." "We've tried ChatGPT — it's fine for a draft, but it doesn't know our business, our clients, or our tone." If either sounds familiar, you don't need a seminar on AI. You need someone to sit inside your actual workflow and tell you what's worth automating and what isn't.
Proof
From a brief-and-photo email back-and-forth to a same-day design proof — a custom AI assistant for a signage company.
We gave the company's team an assistant with real skills, not a chatbot that makes things up. Drop in a client brief and a site photo, and it produces a design proof on the company's own template. Once a concept's approved, it hands the design team an editable file ready to finish. It also polishes outgoing client emails in the company's voice, and routes new enquiries straight to the right person.
Proof
From one person doing every job by hand to a studio that runs on its own coordinated system of AI agents — built for an IT services company.
We didn't just advise on this one — we built it and run on it. Our own website, our own delivery platform, and an automated AI system that handles research, drafting and delivery work end to end, coordinated by one person instead of a team. It runs an IT services company's entire operation. It can do the same for yours.
How this works
Diagnose first. Build second.
We don't start with a tool. We start with a conversation about what's actually slowing your business down. Sometimes that turns into a custom AI agent. Sometimes it's a smaller automation nobody thought to ask for. Sometimes the honest answer is "you don't need this yet" — and we'll tell you that too.
Next step
If the conversation turns into a build, here's what that looks like.
This conversation stays free, no matter what it finds. When it does turn into a custom AI agent, AI Automation is the paid build that comes next — starting at $4,750, fixed price, scoped from exactly what we find here.
Before you get in touch
Questions about AI strategy & consulting
No — most people don't. That's the first conversation: we look at how the business actually runs and find the part that's costing the most time, not the part that sounded most interesting in an AI headline.
Then that's what we tell you. We'd rather you trust the next thing we say than sell you something that doesn't earn its keep.
Not generic chatbots. We build AI agents with real, specific skills tied to how a business actually works — like the assistant we built for a signage company, which turns a client brief and site photo into a design proof, hands an approved concept to the design team as an editable file, polishes outgoing emails in the company's voice, and routes new enquiries to the right person.
Ember Labs, founded by Dave Bock, builds custom AI agents and bespoke software for businesses, based in Adelaide, South Australia. Rather than selling a generic AI tool, we diagnose what's actually slowing a business down first, then build an AI agent, a piece of software, or both — scoped and fixed-priced around that specific problem.
Look for someone who diagnoses before they build, rather than selling a product off the shelf. We run every engagement this way: a free, no-obligation conversation about what's actually costing the business time, before recommending anything — including telling a business honestly if it doesn't need AI yet.
AI Strategy & Consulting is about building custom AI agents and automating workflows inside a business as it already runs. Software Development is building a bespoke web app or platform from scratch when the fix is a piece of software a business doesn't yet have. We offer both, under the same diagnose-first process.
There's no published fixed rate — it isn't sold as a priced "strategy session." The first conversation is free and no-obligation; any paid engagement is scoped and priced from what that conversation finds, the same way our software builds are priced from a strategy report.
Yes. We're based in Adelaide, South Australia, and work with businesses across Australia; the diagnose-first conversation and build process don't require being local to Adelaide.