About the firm
A boutique firm for the AI-native decade.
Cadence Advisors Group was founded in 2023 by a small group of operators from Stripe, McKinsey Digital, and venture-backed AI startups. We built the firm we wanted to hire when we were running companies — one that gives you an actual opinion, writes it down, and stays accountable to whether it worked.
30+
Client engagements since founding
$80M+
In client AI spend optimized or avoided
14
Industries served, from healthcare to PE
Why we started
In late 2022, the people who ran operations at serious companies started asking the same two questions: how do we use this new class of models without setting fire to the business, and who can I ask who isn’t selling me something.
The existing answers were unsatisfying. The Big Four firms had AI practices staffed by analysts who’d never shipped a production system. Boutique AI shops sold implementation hours and had a vested interest in scope creep. Model labs had solutions-engineering teams with real talent but an obvious loyalty to their own product.
What was missing was a firm that behaved the way a respected senior operator would if they took your call: honest, fast, opinionated, and willing to say “don’t do this” when that was the right answer.
That’s the firm we built. Three years in, we’ve run 30+ engagements across healthcare, financial services, private equity, SaaS, and industrial operations. Our clients have optimized or avoided more than $80M in AI-related spend by making the right decisions earlier.
How we work
Every engagement — from a $47 micro-session to a 16-week enterprise build — runs on the same three-part discipline.
01
Diagnose what’s actually broken before prescribing what to build. Most AI projects fail because they solved the wrong problem expensively.
02
Design for your constraints — your team, your data, your regulatory surface — not for a reference architecture built for someone else’s company.
03
Deploy what compounds. We’d rather ship one workflow that keeps paying rent than five that demo well and never hit production.
The full methodology is documented on the approach page.
What we value
Opinions over frameworks
Frameworks are how consultants avoid saying what they think. We say what we think and show our work. If we’re wrong, you catch us fast and we adjust.
Outcomes over engagement time
We price outcomes, not hours. Hourly billing rewards slow thinking and long calendars — both bad for you and insulting to our senior bench.
Knowledge transfer is a deliverable
Every engagement ends with your team more capable than it started. If you need us for phase two, it’s because you want us — not because we built dependency.
No vendor kickbacks. Ever.
We take no referral fees from tool vendors, cloud providers, or model labs. This sounds obvious; most of our competitors quietly take all three.
If this sounds like the firm you were hoping to find
Start with a micro-session or book a 20-minute intro. We respond within one business day, and we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit.