AI Strategy · Agentic Workflows · Data · Governance

AI that makes it from the boardroom to production.

Burr Systems helps leaders decide where AI belongs, then designs and builds it — agentic workflows, data and integration foundations, and the governance to run them responsibly. Executive strategy and hands-on delivery from the same senior team, plus experienced consultants when you need to add capacity. New Jersey-based, working with clients nationwide.

Who we work with

  • Healthcare & payors
  • Financial services
  • Enterprise technology
  • Retail & travel
  • Public sector
Strategy · Design · Build · Govern

What we do

Three practice areas. One accountable team.

Every engagement is scoped to a business outcome and delivered by the senior people you meet — no hand-off to a junior team. We work with the systems you already have and look for quick, defensible wins before recommending a platform change.

AI Strategy & Agentic Workflows

From discovery workshops and readiness assessments to working agents that take real tasks off your team's plate.

  • Executive discovery workshops & use-case prioritization
  • Agent design with tool-calling, retrieval and human checkpoints
  • Claude, AWS Bedrock and open-source model options
How engagements run

Data, Integration & AI Readiness

Unreliable, siloed data is the quiet reason most AI pilots stall. We assess it, connect it, and make it usable.

  • Data and integration architecture across enterprise systems
  • Retrieval (RAG) and knowledge architecture
  • Analytics and executive dashboards leaders actually use
How engagements run

Architecture, Evaluation & Governance

Vendor-neutral technology choices and the controls that let regulated organizations adopt AI with confidence.

  • Platform and vendor evaluation grounded in your requirements
  • Responsible-AI policies, evaluation and auditability
  • Healthcare (HIPAA) and financial-services context
How engagements run

How we help

From possibility to practical progress.

A strategy is only worth something if it moves. Each service ends in a decision, an artifact, or a working capability your organization keeps.

  1. Direction

    AI strategy & discovery

    Facilitated executive workshops, an opportunity map, prioritized use cases, and a sequenced roadmap tied to measurable value.

  2. Design

    Workflow & agent design

    Current-state analysis, redesigned workflows, agent architecture, tool integrations, and where a human must stay in the loop.

  3. Proof

    Prototypes that earn investment

    A focused, working proof of value tested with the people who will use it — before major budget is committed.

  4. Foundation

    Data, retrieval & integration

    Pipelines, APIs, retrieval strategy, and clean connections to the enterprise systems that hold your real data.

  5. Trust

    Responsible AI & governance

    Risk controls, evaluation criteria, security, audit trails, and oversight proportional to the use case and the regulator.

  6. Capability

    Enablement & practice building

    Leadership advisory, team coaching, and standing up internal AI and integration practices that outlast the engagement.

The difference

Strategy that reflects what's actually buildable.

Most firms hand you a roadmap and pass the build to someone else. Doing both keeps the plan honest and the build on purpose.

Typical AI engagement compared with a Burr Systems engagement
DimensionTypical engagementWith Burr Systems
Starting pointA tool or platform in search of a problemThe workflow, the people, and the outcome
Who deliversPartner sells, junior team buildsThe senior consultants you met, start to finish
Technology choiceWhatever the firm resellsVendor-neutral, fitted to your stack
Risk & complianceReviewed at the end, if at allDesigned in from the first workshop
What you keepA slide deckDecisions, working software, and a team that can run it

Approach

A complete path, one step at a time.

You can start at any stage. Each step produces evidence that earns — or saves — the next investment.

  1. Discover

    Executive interviews on goals, process, data, and constraints.

  2. Define

    Prioritized use cases, success measures, risks, and economics.

  3. Prove

    A bounded prototype in front of real users.

  4. Operationalize

    Secure integration, evaluation, monitoring, and governance.

  5. Adopt

    Ownership, enablement, and continuous improvement.

Selected work

Built, not just recommended.

Working systems and engagement materials our team has designed and built. Client details are anonymized.

Healthcare · Agentic AI

Prior-authorization AI intake

An end-to-end demo that ingests fax, PDF, and portal requests, extracts clinical data with Claude, and routes it to a nurse review worklist where reviewers can override AI decisions.

  • Claude
  • Document AI
  • Human-in-the-loop
Read the write-up

Health plan · Strategy

AI discovery workshop

A facilitated executive workshop kit that takes a health plan's leadership from AI ambition to a prioritized, governed roadmap.

  • Executive facilitation
  • Use-case prioritization
  • Governance
Read the write-up

Local-first ML · LLM

Document tailoring pipeline

A Python pipeline that blends local embedding and classification models with the Claude API to tailor structured documents against a target description.

  • Python
  • Hugging Face
  • Claude API
Read the write-up

Who we are

Senior people who build practices — and explain them to the board.

Burr Systems brings together experienced consultants who have worked where enterprise technology meets executive decision-making: building consulting practices, architecting data and integration platforms, and putting AI to work in regulated industries.

Our people are as comfortable facilitating a leadership workshop as writing the code behind an agent. Every engagement is led by a senior consultant, and we add specialists from our bench when the work calls for more hands — so you get the right depth without paying for a pyramid.

New Jersey-based · U.S.-based consultants · In-person or remote

Leadership & team

Jeff Smith

Founder & Principal

15+ years across enterprise software, consulting, and AI and data advisory, with a track record of building practices from the ground up.

  • Practice building — grew Oracle's Fusion Integration Consulting practice from inception into a multi-million-dollar business.
  • Agentic AI on AWS — built Bedrock action groups in Python Lambda to give agents tool-calling before MCP became the norm.
  • Healthcare — HIPAA EDI for multiple payors at SeeBeyond; McKesson Pathways care management.
  • Industry voice — Gartner architecture advisory board (financial services); Cloudera Sessions NYC keynote while at Intel.

Our consultant bench

AI engineering · Data · Architecture

Engagements are staffed from a network of vetted senior consultants, matched to your industry, stack, and timeline. We share specific profiles during scoping, and every consultant works to the same delivery and governance standards.

Discuss staffing for your project

Useful answers

Before we talk.

Straight answers to what leaders usually ask first.

01We don't have an AI strategy yet. Where do we start?

With the work, not the model. A short discovery identifies the workflows with the most friction, the people they affect, the data available, and the risk involved. You leave with a prioritized roadmap rather than a list of trending tools.

02Do you advise, or do you build?

Both. We can frame the opportunity with your executives, build and test a prototype, design the production architecture, and help your team take ownership of it.

03How do you decide whether we need an agent at all?

By looking at how variable the work is, which decisions it requires, what tools and data it touches, and where human judgment is non-negotiable. Some problems need an agent; many need retrieval, plain automation, a process fix — or no AI.

04We're in a regulated industry. How do you handle risk?

Governance is part of the design from day one: data handling, access control, evaluation, traceability, failure modes, and human review sized to the use case. Healthcare and financial-services constraints are familiar territory.

05Which platforms do you work with?

We're vendor-neutral. Recent work spans Anthropic's Claude, AWS (Bedrock, Lambda), Hugging Face open-source models, and the integration and analytics tools already in your environment.

06Can you provide consultants to work inside our team?

Yes. Beyond project engagements, we place senior AI, data, and architecture consultants into client teams for defined periods. Each placement is backed by Burr Systems' delivery standards and a senior lead you can escalate to.

07What does a first engagement look like?

A focused working session on one meaningful business problem. From there we recommend the smallest responsible next step — a discovery, a roadmap, or a bounded proof of value — and tell you honestly if we're not the right fit.

Your next move

What could AI make meaningfully better?

Bring the messy problem, the early idea, the stalled pilot, or the workflow nobody wants to touch. A senior member of our team will reply personally — usually within one business day — with a clear, responsible next step.

No sales team, no lengthy proposal process.

A few sentences is plenty. Please don't include confidential or patient data.