AI Consultant for US Companies
Nic Chin is a Production AI Systems Architect working with US teams remotely — legal, fintech, pharma, and enterprise SaaS. When your AI needs to work in production, not just in the demo. Two live SaaS products as sole architect, accuracy claims reproducible against public benchmarks, and daily US business hours overlap.
0 hallucinated citations across 297 cases on public benchmarks including PatronusAI FinanceBench (NeurIPS 2023) and SEC EDGAR filings. Reproducible methodology.
RAG with verifiable citations
Document intelligence that cites the source for every answer. 0 hallucinated citations across 297 cases on public benchmarks including PatronusAI FinanceBench and SEC EDGAR.
Multi-agent AI systems
Production systems where multiple specialised AI agents collaborate — from 4-agent pipelines to 20-agent ensembles, with verifiable accuracy at each stage.
Fractional AI CTO
Part-time senior AI leadership — strategic roadmap, architecture oversight, vendor evaluation, and team mentorship — at $2.5K–$10K/month.
Compliance-ready AI
SOC 2-aligned security, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 audit trails, CCPA-aware data handling — designed into the architecture from day one, not retrofitted.
Why US Companies Hire a Production AI Systems Architect
AI models are improving every month. AI systems are still failing every day. The model is rarely the problem — the architecture usually is. Most US companies that reach out have the same story: a promising AI pilot that works in demos but breaks with real users, real data volumes, or real compliance review.
Nic Chin designs and ships production AI systems for exactly that gap. Two live SaaS products built as sole architect — SureCiteAI (multi-tenant document intelligence RAG) and SystemAudit (codebase intelligence). The accuracy claims behind those products are reproducible against public benchmarks; the methodology is on the open-source proof page. Independent verification: Upwork Top Rated Plus (top 3% of talent globally), 100% Job Success Score, and a Crunchbase-listed prior venture that raised $350K in seed funding.
How Does Remote Collaboration Work with US Teams?
- Daily US business hours overlap — East Coast teams get a half-day of real-time collaboration; West Coast teams get morning syncs
- Weekly structured demos — working software every week, not status decks
- US contracting norms — direct MSA/SOW engagement or Upwork escrow for lower-friction starts
- Cloud-based development — your repos, your cloud accounts, your data stays under your control
Most of the anonymised case studies on this site are US, UK, and European clients engaged this way — including a US pharmaceutical AI platform taken from prototype to enterprise pilot approval and a US fitness platform (CoachIQ) shipped with multi-modal computer vision.
How Much Does an AI Consultant Cost in the US?
- Hourly rates: $100–$250 per hour. Junior AI developers $100–$150; mid-level consultants $150–$200; senior architects and fractional CTOs $200–$250+
- Project-based: $6,000–$60,000 for focused builds (copilot, document processing, AI pilot to production)
- Discovery sprint: $4,000–$10,000 fixed for a 2-week scoping engagement (architecture document, cost estimate, risk register)
- Fractional AI CTO: $2,500–$10,000 per month for 1–3 days/week of ongoing senior leadership
- Enterprise architecture: $60,000–$300,000+ for complex multi-system AI deployments
The most cost-effective entry is a paid 2-week discovery sprint. You get the architecture document, cost breakdown, and risk register either way — keep the deliverables whether you proceed with the build or not.
US Compliance: SOC 2, FDA, CCPA
Compliance is an architecture decision, not a checkbox. Recent US-relevant work includes a pharmaceutical AI SaaS brought to FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance readiness: immutable audit trails, prompt injection guardrails, PII filtering, and Kubernetes hardening with 0 critical CVEs — 24/24 acceptance criteria passed. For consumer-facing systems, CCPA/CPRA deletion rights are designed across vector stores as well as relational data, because the right-to-delete does not stop at your Postgres instance.
Which US Industries Get the Most from AI Consulting?
- Legal — contract review, due diligence, clause extraction. See the legal AI case study: LPA review reduced from hours to minutes with verified citations inside Microsoft Word
- Financial services and fintech — document analysis grounded in SEC EDGAR, trading signal systems, KYC/AML automation
- Pharma and life sciences — FDA-aligned AI workflows, compliance-ready document intelligence
- Enterprise SaaS — adding production AI features to existing products, multi-tenant RAG architecture, AI-powered support
When AI Is the Wrong Fit (and I Will Tell You)
- The workflow is already deterministic and low-volume. If a clean rule-based script handles it, AI adds cost and unpredictability. Build the script.
- You have no reliable source documents to ground the AI on. RAG without good source data is just confident guessing. Fix the data first.
- You want AI to make legally binding decisions autonomously. In regulated sectors, the right architecture is human-in-the-loop AI assistance — not autonomy.
- The budget is below $10K and the timeline is below 2 weeks. That budget gets you a prototype, not a production system. I will tell you to use a no-code tool instead.
On a strategy call, if any of these apply to your situation, I will say so directly and not bill you for the build.
Recent US & international outcomes
Anonymised under NDA. Sector, region, year, and outcome shown — full references available privately on request.
Pharmaceutical AI SaaS taken from prototype to enterprise pilot approval: 2 critical vulnerabilities fixed, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 readiness, 24/24 acceptance criteria passed.
Read moreLPA / contract review reduced from 14 hours to 90 minutes per document via 12-component RAG with verified citations. Microsoft Word add-in shipped to lawyer workflow.
Read moreCoachIQ: multi-modal AI form analysis at 95% accuracy with Gemini-primary, OpenAI-fallback architecture protecting against API failures.
Read moreMulti-tenant RAG SaaS shipped as sole architect: 147ms responses, 96.8% retrieval accuracy, 0 hallucinations across 297 public-benchmark cases.
Read moreReady to get your AI into production?
Book a free 30-minute strategy call. You will get an honest assessment of what AI can realistically do for your business, a rough cost range, and a recommendation on whether to start with a paid 2-week sprint, a fractional engagement, or no AI at all. No sales pitch — just a candid architecture conversation.
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