Services
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute call. No deck. No pitch. You describe what's costing your team the most time — we tell you whether it's worth automating and what it would take. See how an engagement works →
Project · 2 weeks
We interview your team, map every workflow, and rank automation opportunities by ROI — not by what's technically interesting.
Outcome: A prioritized automation roadmap with 3–8 opportunities, each sized and estimated.
Project · 2–4 weeks
We configure the AI tools your team already pays for, build custom prompt libraries by role, and train your team to get real work done with them.
Outcome: Your team using AI confidently for work that matters, not abandoning it after week two.
Project · 4–10 weeks
AI agents that handle complex, judgment-heavy work around the clock — with approval gates wherever a person should still weigh in.
Outcome: Work that used to wait for a person now happens in minutes, every time.
Project · 2–8 weeks
We build the systems that take repetitive admin off your team's plate — lead pipelines, onboarding, document generation, billing flows.
Outcome: Hours back every week. Your team focuses on the relationship, not the paperwork.
Project · 2–4 weeks
Live metrics pulled from the systems you already use — the one dashboard your team will actually open on Monday.
Outcome: Decisions made on current data, not a Monday report that is already three days stale.
Ongoing · monthly
We stay on after handoff — monitoring, fixing breakage fast, and surfacing new opportunities as your business changes.
Outcome: Systems that hold up 6 and 12 months in — and a partner who surfaces what to automate next.
Common questions
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute call and a written scope. Most projects fall between five and twenty-five thousand dollars depending on complexity, with the Automation Blueprint as the smallest fixed-scope entry point. We do not bill hourly and we do not require a retainer. If we cannot tell you what a system will do and how you will know it is working before we start, we will not build it.
Most engagements run between two and ten weeks of calendar time. An Automation Blueprint is two weeks. A reporting dashboard runs two to four weeks. Workflow Automation runs two to eight weeks. Custom AI Agents run four to ten weeks. Every project includes a two-week soak period where the system runs unattended before we declare it done.
Headwaters is based in Portland, Oregon, and the primary service area is Oregon and Washington, but client engagements happen remotely across the United States. To date we have shipped projects for clients in Tampa Bay, Florida and the Pacific Northwest. The work is the same whether you are local or remote.
Zapier and Make are useful for simple, low-stakes glue between apps. Headwaters builds the systems those platforms cannot reach: workflows that need real judgment, AI lint passes, multi-step approval gates, durable logging, and systems that survive an API change or a credential rotation without quietly breaking. We will recommend Zapier when it is the right tool, and tell you when it is not.
Every engagement includes documentation written in plain language and a handoff session so your team can maintain what we built. Most clients choose the optional AI Operator engagement after launch, where we monitor every workflow, fix breakage fast, and surface new opportunities as the business changes. You can also take the system fully in-house at handoff.
Both. AI is one tool in the automation stack, not the whole stack. Plenty of high-ROI automation work does not need AI at all — straightforward integrations, scheduled jobs, document generation, dashboards. We use AI where it actually adds value (judgment, classification, lint, summarization) and use simpler tools everywhere else.
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We'll tell you whether it's worth automating, what it would take, and what to do first. No pitch.
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