Cercie Florano is an AI operations consultant for service businesses, and every engagement starts with the process map, not the software.
AI operations consulting means mapping how a business actually runs, then building the AI systems that run it, in that order. SwiftStream is the solo practice of Cercie Florano, an AI operations consultant for service businesses in the United States and Singapore. Every engagement opens with a full operations audit delivered back within 24 hours: the business drawn as a BPMN process map exactly as it works today, a second map showing the redesigned flow, and every bottleneck named and ranked. The build follows the map, on n8n, GoHighLevel, Supabase, Next.js, Vercel, Stripe, Camunda and the Claude and GPT APIs, with engagements starting at $10,000.
- $10,000Where engagements start
- 24 hoursTurnaround on the full operations audit
- 2 weeksFrom signing to first automation live
- 1,523Bookings processed, CPR Syndicate
- 687Runs with zero errors
- 175Inbound conversations handled in 9 days, event-furniture brand
- 8Partner signups on the rental network's first night
AI operations consulting means fixing how the work runs before adding AI to it
It is two disciplines in a fixed order. First operations design: drawing the process, naming who does what, finding every point where work is handed from one person or system to the next, and deciding in advance what happens when something goes wrong. Then systems engineering: building the software that runs the corrected process. Operations first. AI second. Always.
This is not tool selection with an AI label on it, and it is not putting a chatbot in front of a business. Most failed AI projects are not model failures. They are automation built on a process nobody had drawn, so the automation inherits every gap in that process and then runs those gaps faster. A broken process automated is a broken process that now costs money every time it runs.
The disciplines involved have names, and they are worth stating plainly because they are what you are actually hiring: business process mapping in BPMN, operations design, workflow automation, systems integration, AI agent design, and custom software development. One person doing all six is what makes the order possible, because the person who found the bottleneck is the person who builds the fix.
The first thing you receive is an operations audit, back within 24 hours
The audit is a deliverable, not a discovery call. It contains every process in the business mapped end to end, every bottleneck named and located, and a ranked list of what to fix in what order. It also states which of those things are worth automating and which are not, because some of them are a step to delete or a decision to reassign, and saying so is part of the job.
The 24-hour turnaround exists to stop the diagnosis from becoming the engagement. Analysis expands to fill whatever time it is given, and a business losing money on manual handoffs cannot sit through a long discovery phase before anything changes. It also lets you judge the quality of the thinking before you commit to a build.
What it needs from you is small: a walk-through of one real customer from first contact to finished, and a look at where the work currently lives. Not the version of the process that gets described in a meeting. The one that actually runs on a Tuesday when someone is out sick.
Version 1 of the map is the business as it really runs. Version 2 is the one worth building on.
Version 1 documents reality, including the parts nobody would put in a pitch deck: the spreadsheet holding three steps together, the exception path only one person knows, the point where the owner is the only link between sales and delivery. If version 1 looks tidy, it is wrong, and it gets redrawn.
Version 2 is the redesigned flow. Steps get removed, order changes, and decisions that were being made ad hoc get made once and written down. Some of what version 2 fixes is not automation at all. Deleting a redundant approval or changing who owns a decision costs nothing and often removes more delay than a workflow would.
The build is executed against version 2, so the software sits on a process that has already been corrected. BPMN is used rather than an informal diagram because it is a standard notation with defined meaning: a gateway is a gateway, an event is an event, and the map stays readable by someone else a year later. Camunda handles the modeling. The map is the specification the build is checked against, and when a build question comes up later, the answer is usually already on it.
The map decides what gets built, which is why the builds end up looking nothing like each other
What comes out of an engagement is not a fixed product. It is whatever the map says the business is missing, and that has landed in four broad places: CRM and automation infrastructure, so handoffs stop depending on someone remembering; AI agents that handle inbound conversations, with guardrails, a defined hand-off rule and a kill switch; custom booking and scheduling platforms; and custom software when nothing off the shelf fits the process the map shows.
The stack is n8n, GoHighLevel, Supabase, Next.js, Vercel, Stripe, Camunda and BPMN, and the Claude and GPT model APIs. The core combination is GoHighLevel, n8n and Supabase working together. Nothing new gets introduced unless the map shows a gap the existing stack genuinely cannot cover.
The method is the constant. The builds are not. For CPR Syndicate, a training company running 14 locations, the map produced a custom booking platform that has processed 1,523 bookings, 894 of them confirmed, with zero errors across 687 runs. For a luxury event-furniture brand, the same starting point produced an inbound AI agent on Instagram and Messenger that handled 175 conversations and sent 779 messages automatically in nine days, with average response time under a minute. For the same brand, it produced a rental site with a live booking calendar plus a partner network matching leads to owners by zip code within 100 miles, which had eight partner signups on its first night. Three different industries, three different builds, one order of operations.
An agency, a freelancer and a large consulting firm each solve a different problem than this one
An AI agency has a team, a repeatable offer, and a product it installs. That is a real advantage when you already know what you want and want it delivered quickly by people who have shipped it before. The limitation is the direction of fit: an agency starts from the tool it knows and fits your business to it. If your process is sound and you need capacity, that is a good buy. If your process is the problem, installing software on top of it makes the problem run faster.
A freelancer builds what you specify, usually well and usually cheaper. The catch is in the word specify. Most owners can describe the symptom, not the cause, so the specification ends up being a guess about which fix will help, and the freelancer builds the guess faithfully. Here the specification is the first deliverable rather than something you are expected to arrive with. If you already have the spec and the decision is made, hire the freelancer. That is genuinely the cheaper path.
A large consulting firm will do analysis at a depth and scale a solo practice cannot, and if you have a board to convince or several divisions to align, that is worth paying for. What you get at the end is a deck and a recommendation. The build is a separate procurement, usually with a different vendor, a different budget, and a gap between the people who did the thinking and the people writing the code. If you need the thing running next month, a deck is the wrong shape of deliverable.
Hiring one person has a real cost, and some businesses should not hire this one
SwiftStream is one person. That means a limited number of engagements at a time, no bench to absorb a spike, and no support desk staffed around the clock. If a vendor with an SLA and a support rotation is a hard requirement, hire a firm with staff. What you get in exchange is that the person who drew the map writes the code and does the handover, so nothing is lost in translation between the analysis and the build, and there is no account manager between you and the work.
This is not for businesses without enough volume to feel the pain. A solo operator, or a company still finding its offer, does not have a process problem yet, and a $10,000 engagement is the wrong purchase. It is also not for owners who want a chatbot in front of a process they would rather not examine, because the examination is the product. And it is not for buyers with a procurement committee and a long vendor-approval cycle, since the method depends on a founder being able to say yes and then answer questions about how the business actually works.
One more exclusion. If you have already decided exactly what to build and want someone to execute it, that is a freelancer job, and paying consulting rates to have your existing decision confirmed is a waste of your money.
Engagements start at $10,000, and the first move is walking one real customer end to end
That figure covers the full operations audit delivered back within 24 hours, with every process mapped and every bottleneck named, and the highest-leverage automation live within two weeks of signing. Larger builds are quoted after the audit, once the map shows what is actually worth building. Quoting a build before the map exists is guessing, and a number produced by guessing is either padded or wrong.
The first step is a conversation about how work moves through the business today. Before that call, you can do the most useful part yourself: follow a single customer from the moment they find you to the moment they are finished, and write down every point where a person retypes something, forwards something, checks something, or chases someone. That count is the real cost of the current process, and it is the input the audit starts from.
SwiftStream is a solo practice: one AI operations consultant for service businesses, working with founder-led companies in the United States and Singapore. You can start the conversation at swiftstream.ai.
A broken process automated is a broken process that now costs money every time it runs.