Questions, answered straight

Yes — ThornwoodAI LLC (Illinois). You're contracting with a registered US entity, with a written agreement both ways.

• One-off work (pilot, diagnosis, workshop): a Stripe payment link — click and pay.
• Retainer: a Stripe subscription (recurring monthly).
• Standard terms are 50% on signing, balance on delivery. We send the link with the agreement.

Yes — and it's in the agreement:

• Your data stays yours. We never resell it or train models on it.
• We work inside your existing systems with least-privilege access — only what the workflow needs.
• Anything regulated (HIPAA / PII) is scoped explicitly in the intake before we touch it.

Every agent ships with a human-in-the-loop checkpoint by default — it drafts, your team approves, especially early. Low-confidence items get flagged for review instead of going out automatically, and we tune that threshold to your comfort.

We price on value created, not hours worked. The ladder:

• Diagnosis → a paid map of where AI pays off for you (yours to keep).
• Pilot → fixed fee, 2–4 weeks, proves the number.
• Retainer → flat monthly while it runs.
• Value-share → a slice of measured output ($ per document, hours saved × your rate, leads × value per lead).

The point: you only pay when an agent makes or saves your business money.

The pilot runs 2–4 weeks and produces a working agent on one real workflow — with a baseline number so you can see exactly what changed.

We stand behind the pilot: if it's not delivering, we keep iterating at no extra cost through the pilot period — and there's no long-term lock-in. We'd rather earn the retainer than hold you to one.

A general chatbot is a blank page — you still do the work. This is a purpose-built agent wired into one specific workflow, doing the same task the same way every time. The difference between a tool and an employee.

No. The agents run on the tools you already use — Gmail, Excel, your CRM. Nothing new to buy, nothing for your team to learn. The lift on your side is one short intake plus access — usually under an hour.

You get an operator with Fortune 500 experience in AI, data, operations, and leadership — building for a business your size, without an agency retainer or a new full-time hire. And our incentive is your result, not billable hours.

Founder Sam (Soma Szabo) — an operator with Fortune 500 experience across AI, data, operations, and leadership, now building practical AI for small businesses.