Try Valley
Put your outbound workflow to work.
Saniya Sood
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Updated:
Published October 8, 2026 · Updated October 8, 2026
The short answer: a go-to-market team hires an AI consultancy for one of three jobs: to build something (an agent, a workflow, a data pipeline) faster than the team could, to decide what to build (strategy and a roadmap), or to run it afterwards. The six firms below cover that range from a San Francisco studio to the build arm of a global strategy firm. The only honest way to pick is to score a small, real job with two of them.
Disclosure: SF AI Labs, AY Automate and Growth Room have exchanged links with Valley. That did not decide inclusion or order; the list runs from the smallest engagement to the largest. Valley makes outbound software and is marked where it appears. Every fact below was read from the firm's own website on October 8, 2026.
Valley is an AI outbound platform that finds the people most likely to buy from you - from live buying signals, natural-language search, or your own lists - qualifies them against your ICP, researches each one, and sends personalized messages across email and LinkedIn that get 15-45% reply rates, against a category average of about 2%.
► If the job is outbound, the software already exists: try Valley free for 7 days
What we looked for
Comfort with a small team and fast iteration, not a twelve-week discovery phase.
A record of turning strategy into working software, stated on the firm's own site.
Engagement terms you can read before the call: fixed price, retainer, or refund terms.
Security and ownership answered up front: who owns the code, the data and the models.
How we checked
We read each firm's homepage and service pages on October 8, 2026 and recorded only what is printed there. Metrics are the firm's own and are attributed as such. One firm we intended to include, QuantumBlack by McKinsey, could not be read because its page did not load for us, so it is not here.
Firm | Base | Choose it when | Engagement terms published |
|---|---|---|---|
SF AI Labs | San Francisco | You want strategy, build and launch from one small team | No |
AY Automate | Global, clients in North America, Europe, MENA and Asia | You want agents and workflows shipped on a retainer | Month one refundable |
1Labs.ai | US and India | You want an AI-native product built with IP handover | Fixed-price MVP, month-to-month pod |
Growth Room | Paris | You want AI applied to acquisition: GEO, ads, outbound, CRM | Fixed price, subscription or day rate |
Thoughtworks | Global | You need data platforms modernised before AI will work | No |
BCG X | 80 cities | You are a large organisation building new AI-driven businesses | No |
1. SF AI Labs: strategy, build and launch from one studio
SF AI Labs describes its work as designing, building and launching AI that creates business value, across strategy and roadmap, custom development (agents, platforms, prototypes), commercialisation, testing and launch, and executive advisory, with specialities in knowledge systems, automation, LLM fine-tuning and AI infrastructure. It is based in San Francisco and lists sectors from financial services and healthcare to professional services. Published case studies include a customer support automation it says cut volume by 40%, an AI survey coach for 20,000 employees, and an AI revenue intelligence platform. No pricing is published.
Choose it when you want one small team to own the problem from the first conversation to a launched product, and you are in or near San Francisco.
2. AY Automate: agents and workflows on a refundable first month
AY Automate builds AI agents, custom workflow automation on n8n and Make, RAG pipelines and SaaS MVPs, and places AI-native engineers inside client teams. It serves US and European companies and government agencies, names 30+ clients including Ronin Global and HelloCustomer, and states that clients remove up to 80% of repetitive tasks. Its terms are the most readable on this list: a retainer with the first month fully refundable if it does not deliver, a free 30-minute strategy call and same-day response. Prices are not printed.
Choose it when the job is a specific workflow (lead routing, CRM enrichment, reply handling) and you want it running inside a month.
3. 1Labs.ai: an AI-native product studio with IP handover
1Labs.ai calls itself an AI-native product development studio covering product strategy, UI and UX, AI development, agents and automation, and growth, for founders, startups and enterprises, with US and India options. Its engagement model is a free product plan, a fixed-price MVP and a month-to-month pod, with full IP handover and no vendor lock-in: the client owns the repository, the infrastructure and the intellectual property. Regional pricing sits on a separate page; portfolio examples include KPonline, Groupla and Obsidian.
Choose it when you are building a product rather than an internal tool and want to own everything at the end.
4. Growth Room: AI applied to acquisition
Growth Room is a Paris growth agency whose services are GEO (visibility on Google and AI platforms), AI marketing and paid ads across Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn and ChatGPT, outbound prospecting, HubSpot CRM work, ABM and RevOps. It names clients including Devialet, IonQ, Quantinuum and Toyota, and publishes results such as +243% organic traffic for Ecla and a ROAS of 4 for EKYOG. Engagements are fixed price, subscription or a day rate, depending on the objective.
Choose it when the AI work you need is on the demand side: being found by AI assistants, ads, and the CRM plumbing behind them.
5. Thoughtworks: data modernisation before the AI
Thoughtworks sells data modernisation strategy, data product development, data platform migration with AI-powered accelerators, data mesh architecture, enterprise AI (AI factories for copilots and agents) and its AI/works agentic development platform. Published engagement results include cutting a biopharmaceutical company’s delivery from 12 weeks to under four and 95% lower storage costs for a public transport dataset. No pricing is published.
Choose it when the honest diagnosis is that your data is not ready, and the AI project is really a platform project.
6. BCG X: the build arm of a strategy firm
BCG X is BCG’s tech build and design unit, with nearly 3,000 experts in 80 cities, 82+ patents and patents pending and 30+ technology partnerships. It builds AI and GenAI solutions, customer experience, large-scale digital platforms and new ventures, and describes an end-to-end approach that pairs BCG’s industry work with engineering and design. No pricing is published.
Choose it when you are a large organisation launching an AI-driven business line and the board wants a name it knows.
► Need the outbound part built this week, not this quarter? Book a demo
What to have ready before the first call
The job in one sentence, with the metric it should move.
Who owns the result internally, and how many hours a week they have.
Where the data lives and who can grant access.
Your security and procurement constraints, written down.
A budget band. Every firm here will ask; only two publish terms.
How to run a fair test
Pick a job small enough to finish in four weeks and real enough to matter.
Brief two firms identically and ask each for a scoped proposal with a price.
Score the proposals on who owns the code, how they handle your data, and what happens in month two.
Run one. Judge on working software in your environment, not a demo in theirs.
Where Valley fits (our product). If the job is outbound, the thing most teams would commission is already a product: Valley finds people showing buying signals, qualifies, researches and writes, with a person approving each send. From $149 per seat a month billed quarterly. See what an AI SDR is, and is not.
► Start with the people already looking at you: 7 days free
FAQ
How much does an AI consulting firm cost? Of the six here, only 1Labs.ai (fixed-price MVP, month-to-month pod) and Growth Room (fixed price, subscription or day rate) publish their terms, and neither prints a number on the pages we read. AY Automate publishes a refund term instead.
Should a GTM team hire an AI consultancy or buy software? Buy software when the job is a known category (outbound, enrichment, analytics). Hire a consultancy when the job is specific to your data or process and no product does it.
What is the difference between SF AI Labs and BCG X? Scale and shape. SF AI Labs is a San Francisco studio that takes a project from strategy to launch; BCG X is nearly 3,000 people in 80 cities attached to a strategy firm.
Why is QuantumBlack not on the list? Its page did not load for us on October 8, 2026, and we do not describe a firm from memory.
How this page was made: the facts were read from the sources named in the text on October 8, 2026; drafted with AI assistance; fact-checked, reviewed and edited by Saniya Sood.
