AI consulting for manufacturers, with the work shown first.
ColabContent is a Boston AI consulting house that builds custom automation for job shops and contract manufacturers of 20 to 250 employees. Before any call, you can have a working prototype of one task in 5 business days, or your shop's cost benchmark memo by email in 2 minutes. Both are free. Production builds are a fixed fee of $45,000 to $180,000 with the code owned by the shop at handoff, and the 45-minute diagnosis is booked at cal.com/colabcontent/45mins.
Pick one. Neither one puts you on a sales call.
What a shop prototype usually is.
You name the task. These are the four that shops of 20 to 250 employees ask for most, so you can see the shape of what arrives.
Quoting from the RFQ package
The customer's RFQ and drawing set read, the part numbers and quantities pulled out, prior runs of the same or similar parts found in a fictitious job history, and a draft quote built from your own routing and material costs for an estimator to approve.
Purchase order entry
The customer PO read from email or a portal PDF, the line items matched to existing part numbers, the pricing and delivery dates checked against the quote that won the work, and the discrepancies listed before anything is keyed into the ERP.
Certificates of conformance and material certs
The shipment's certificate package assembled from heat numbers, inspection records and the customer's own quality clauses, drafted in their required format instead of being rebuilt by hand for every release.
ERP re-keying and job status
Data that today gets typed into Epicor, Global Shop Solutions or JobBOSS and again into a spreadsheet moves once, with a review screen before anything is written, and a plain-language answer to where a job actually stands.
How the engagement runs.
The prototype you request here is the first step. Everything after it is optional and priced up front.
Free diagnosis, 45 minutes
Operator to operator. Both sides leave with the constraint written in one sentence. Either side can stop there at no cost.
Prototype on your own data
Under NDA, on a representative slice of real jobs, within 7 to 10 days. If it does not perform to the diagnosis, you owe nothing and keep the work.
Fixed-fee build, 4 to 7 weeks
$45,000 to $180,000 depending on integration depth, inside your own cloud tenant. You receive the code, prompts, runbook and documentation. No per-seat fee, no platform to renew.
The questions shops ask first.
What does an AI consultant for manufacturers cost?
ColabContent builds custom automation for job shops and contract manufacturers as a fixed-fee commission of $45,000 to $180,000, set after a free diagnosis and a free prototype. There is no hourly meter, no per-seat license and no ongoing platform fee; the shop owns the code at handoff. Independent consultants charge $150 to $500 per hour and mid-tier firms $300 to $1,000 per hour for comparable work.
What is the free prototype?
You name one task your shop does by hand, such as reading an RFQ package and drafting the quote, entering a customer purchase order, assembling the certificate of conformance and material certs for a shipment, or moving data between Epicor, Global Shop Solutions or JobBOSS and the rest of the shop floor. Within 5 business days ColabContent sends a link to a working prototype of that task running on fictitious data, with no NDA and no call required. If the shop wants it running on its own data, the next step is the 45-minute diagnosis call at cal.com/colabcontent/45mins.
What is in the cost benchmark memo?
The memo takes six numbers you type in (estimators and engineers, their blended rate, hours per week they spend quoting and re-keying RFQ data, production control and admin headcount, their rate and their hours per week on order entry and shop paperwork) and returns the annual dollar leak on each line, the total, and the payback period against ColabContent's $45,000 to $180,000 fixed fee. It is emailed within about a minute of submitting the form.
Does either option lead to a sales call?
No. Both are delivered by email with nothing else attached. A principal at ColabContent replies personally to prototype requests, and the 45-minute diagnosis call is offered, not scheduled, at cal.com/colabcontent/45mins. Nobody phones you.
Rather just talk?
Forty-five minutes, operator to operator. You leave with the constraint written in one sentence, whether or not we work together.