A private AI practice

AI, handled.

I find the few places in your business where AI genuinely pays off, then build the systems and run them for you. You never touch the technology.

Request an intro call Read how I work

One operator. A handful of clients at a time, by introduction.

The premise

Most of what is sold as AI is noise. Part of what you pay me for is to tell you where it earns its keep in your business, and where it does not.

A fully automated service is a commodity racing to zero. What you are buying here is judgment with AI speed, and one accountable person. The premium is the human.

What I build

Four things, done properly.

Everything is shaped to how you actually work. Nothing here is a package off a shelf.

The AI Operator

A personal AI chief of staff. It triages your inbox and drafts replies in your voice, sends you a morning brief, preps you for meetings, and keeps a searchable memory of your world: people, deals, commitments, documents. No app to learn, no dashboard. You text it.

“Your 2pm with Marcus is in fifteen minutes. Here is what you discussed in March, and the two numbers he will ask about.”

This is relief: the low-grade overhead a principal carries all day, gone. And it compounds: it learns your world week by week.

Deal & Document Intelligence

Contracts analyzed. Due-diligence and research briefs. First-pass memos and deal screens. Data rooms summarized. A standing triage that researches every inbound deal and briefs you before you open it. Your recurring investor, portfolio, and board updates drafted for your review.

A first pass on a full data room in hours, not weeks, and every claim in the memo links back to the page it came from. You check the judgment, not the reading.

Revenue & Back-Office Automation

Instant response to every new lead. Follow-up that never drops. A CRM that updates itself. Invoices chased, meetings scheduled, reports that write themselves.

The average business answers a new lead in two days. Answer in the first minute and you win up to four times more of the same inquiries.

Custom Tools & Owned Software

Internal tools, dashboards, client portals, databases, and full web and mobile apps your business owns instead of rents, up to a private portfolio and family-office intelligence system a principal owns outright. You know the pattern: five subscriptions that never quite fit and do not talk to each other, and someone re-typing data between them. This replaces that with software built to exactly how you work.

An owned tool costs a fraction of one year of the software it replaces, and the subscription line goes to zero.

In plain terms

Here is what that actually looks like.

Five kinds of work I take off your plate. Open any one to see real examples. If something here is a chore in your week, it is probably a candidate.

Win more of the customers you already attract

You are already paying to get people to call, email, and fill out forms. Most businesses are slow to respond, and the lead goes cold. This closes that gap.

Every new lead gets a warm, personal reply within a minute, day or night, with a link to book time.
A missed call fires off a friendly text so the person never slips away.
Follow-up that never forgets, until the lead books or clearly says no.
Your old, dormant leads gently woken back up, which often turns a dead list into real bookings.
Happy clients asked for a review at exactly the right moment, and unhappy ones come to you first, not to Google.

Take the recurring busywork off your plate

The small, repeating tasks that eat a day of every week before anyone notices, handled in the background so you and your team stop doing them by hand.

Invoices sent and politely chased until they are paid.
Scheduling and reminders that run themselves, with fewer no-shows.
The weekly or monthly report that writes its own first draft from your numbers, ready for you to glance at and send.
Proposals and quotes drafted in minutes from a call or a form.
New clients and new hires walked through onboarding without you chasing each step.
Your contact list and records keeping themselves up to date, instead of going stale.

Handle the reading, research, and writing

The paperwork and research that take hours of a sharp person's time. This is where AI is strongest, and where a background in real research matters most.

Contracts, leases, and full data rooms read and boiled down to a plain-English summary that flags anything worth a second look, with every point traceable back to the exact page.
Due-diligence and background briefs on a company, a deal, or a person, ready before your meeting.
Deep research at scale on any subject, hundreds of sources synthesized into something you can actually use, not a wall of links.
Your recurring investor, board, and portfolio updates drafted for your review in your own voice.
Serious long-form writing, up to and including a full book, done to a genuine human standard and edited so it never reads like generic AI filler.

A right hand that runs your day

A personal assistant, built from AI and run by me, that handles the daily mental load a busy principal carries. There is nothing for you to learn. You text it.

A short morning brief: what is on today, what is overdue, what needs you.
Prep before every meeting: who you are seeing, the history, and what they will likely ask.
A reliable memory of your world, the people, deals, commitments, and documents, that you can just ask.
The routine messages and updates you send drafted and ready, so they go out on time.

Software and apps your business owns

The bigger builds. What used to take a development team and a year now takes one focused person and a matter of weeks, and you own the result outright.

Internal tools and dashboards that finally fit exactly how you work.
Web and mobile apps, for your team or your customers, built from scratch to your specification.
Client portals and databases that replace the patchwork of subscriptions you rent but that never quite fit.
A private, all-in-one view of your whole portfolio or holdings, yours alone, not rented from anyone.

These are quoted per project. Everything smaller above usually starts within a week or two.

How we work

Three steps. You stay out of the machinery.

Step 1

Intro call Free · 30 minutes

Is there a real problem worth solving, and a fit. If there is not, I will say so and point you somewhere useful.

Step 2

The Audit Paid · 1 to 2 weeks

I learn how you work, then hand you a short, ranked roadmap of the few automations worth doing, priced in your own numbers: what each costs you today and how fast it pays for itself. Where possible I prove it live against your real historical cases, and I report the misses along with the hits. The roadmap is yours outright, written so you could hand it to any competent builder, including not me. Credited toward a build.

Step 3

Build, then run Fixed fee, then retainer

A fixed-fee build of the one workflow that matters most, delivered working. Then a retainer under which I keep everything running as your business and the tools change, and build the next thing as needs surface.

One thing at a time

I will not try to automate your whole business at once. We pick the single highest-value workflow, get it working and trusted, then move to the next. That is what actually ships. And if you have already bought AI that half works, the audit doubles as the cleanup: I will tell you what to keep, what to kill, and how to make the rest trustworthy.

Trust

Built so you can rely on it.

The work is only useful if you never have to worry about it. Four rules cover that.

Approval before action

Anything that touches money, clients, or your name routes through sign-off before it moves. Nothing acts alone where it matters.

Everything on the record

Every action is logged and reviewable. You can always see what was done, and why.

Proven on your history

Before anything goes live, it is tested against your real past cases, and you see exactly how it scored.

Watched daily

I monitor everything I run. If something drifts, I know before you do, and it gets fixed before it costs you anything.

Engagements

Simple terms, stated plainly.

Engagement	What it is	Fee	Timeline
AI Opportunity Audit	Your ranked automation roadmap, a deliverable you keep	$5,000, credited toward a build	1 to 2 weeks
Done-for-You Build	One workflow, built and delivered working	From $10,000	2 to 4 weeks
Custom Software Build	A tool your business owns, quoted to scope	From $15,000	3 to 8 weeks
Operator Retainer	Everything I have built for you: kept running, watched daily, made better every month. No meters.	From $3,000 / month	3-month minimum

Premium, and deliberately so. Weigh it against the cost of a hire, not the cost of software: the audit prices every workflow in your own numbers before anything gets built, and the good ones pay for themselves in the first months. If the math does not clear comfortably, I will be the one to tell you.

Fit

This works best for a particular kind of owner.

For

Owners, principals, and practice owners with recurring operational and knowledge work: follow-up, onboarding, reporting, research, drafting, back office.
People who built the business to buy back their time, and are still waiting for that part.
People who want a problem to disappear, not a tool to learn or a team to manage.
People who care about discretion, and about keeping their data their own.

Not for

Anyone who wants to learn to build this themselves.
Price-shoppers, or anyone looking for a large multi-team software rollout.
Work that requires formal compliance certification or contractual uptime guarantees.

If your need crosses one of those lines, I will say so plainly and help you find the right partner. That honesty is the point.

The operator

I am Diego S. Ding. Before this I spent more than a decade in global health and international development, Harvard-trained. I led research, data, and evaluation work across dozens of countries and published in peer-reviewed journals. For the last several years I have also been a self-directed investor, which is how I came to know this community.

Over the past year I have devoted myself to AI. I am not a software engineer by training; I got here by building, daily and deliberately, with AI as my engineering partner, and I have shipped real software end to end: web and mobile apps, databases, always-on systems. That older discipline in research and writing now points at reading, analysis, and long-form work done to a real human standard. I keep taking on things I have not done before, and when a project is genuinely beyond a one-person practice, usually a matter of scale, I say so and help you find the right team.

What you get is my full attention and more invested hours than a firm will give you. I move quickly and I go deep on your business. Two commitments on top of that: your data stays yours, never resold and never used to train anything, and the work is done by me, not handed to an anonymous team.

Diego S. Ding

Palanca · Founder and operator

Begin

Let’s find the one automation worth building first.

A short call to see whether there is a fit. If there is one, we start with the Audit. If there is not, I will tell you.

Request an intro call or write to diego@palancasystems.com