You don’t need a consultant. Some organizations want one anyway.
The platform is built so you can do this yourself — and most customers should. Advisory is the working-with-a-guide tier for organizations that don’t have an internal owner yet, need a credible outside voice for the board, or need the program standing in weeks rather than quarters. Delivered by the people who wrote the control library the platform runs on.
Three rungs. Each one stands on its own.
Advisory is the top rung, and it is the one most people should skip. Here is the whole ladder, in the order we would actually recommend it.
Readiness Scorecard
$0 · 5 minutes · no signupFifteen questions per domain. Tells you where you stand across AI, risk, technology, data and privacy — and whether you have a problem worth spending money on.
The Platform
$3,500/yr → $25,000/yr5 modules, cited policies, board reporting. You run it. Most organizations need nothing beyond this, and we’d rather you start here. Free for 15 days, no credit card required.
Start hereAdvisory
$1,500 → $20,000 · retainers from $2,500/moWe advise; your team builds. Inventory, charter, risk register, board briefing — worked through together so your people can run the program once we leave.
Each rung stands on its own — nothing here is a funnel trick.
When advisory is the right call.
Three situations. If none of them describe you, the subscription is the better buy.
Nobody owns AI yet
The work has been assigned to someone who already has a full job, or to no one at all. Software does not fix an ownership gap in the first ninety days — a person does, and then hands it back.
The board wants an outside voice
A funder, an insurer, or an audit committee has asked for independent review. An internally produced assessment answers a different question than the one being asked.
The clock is short
A deadline measured in weeks — a contract clause, a board meeting, a regulatory date. Doing it yourself is cheaper. It is not faster.
If you have someone who owns AI, buy the subscription and skip the advisory services.
A named owner, a few months of runway, and the willingness to work through the platform is all this takes. That is the cheaper, better outcome, and it is what the product was built for. We will tell you so on the call rather than sell you an engagement you don’t need.
Try it free for 15 days and see if you really need advisory at all.
All 5 modules open, no credit card required. The whole system is written in plain language — it walks a non-technical person from a blank page to something a board will accept, without a consultant translating in the middle. Two weeks is long enough to find out whether your team can run it on its own, and if it can, that is the best outcome available to you. The engagements will still be here.
Fixed scope. Published price.
Same principle as the pricing page — you shouldn’t need a discovery call to learn a number. 5 ways in, priced by how much of the work is ours rather than yours. The nonprofit rate is 20% off, matching the platform.
Start small — your team already has this mostly in hand
Executive Strategy Session
For a leader with one decision and a date on it. A trustee asked a question at the last board meeting and the next one is six weeks out. A funder put an AI clause in the renewal and somebody has to sign it. Staff pasted client information into a chatbot and the board will hear about it.
- Pre-session intake and document review, so no time goes on discovery
- 90 minutes, up to six participants, recorded on request
- Written summary and recommendation within three business days
- One follow-up email round within 14 days
Already on Agency? Your plan includes one of these — say so when you book and we will not invoice it.
If you can name the document and the date, this is the right thing to buy — and if you cannot, say so on the inquiry and we will point you at something cheaper. Credited in full toward a larger engagement booked within 30 days. No subscription required.
Half-Day Training
Working training on the module you are rolling out next. Your team at the keyboard, on your own data, not a demo tenant.
- One module, chosen by you, taught against your real environment
- Up to 25 people — the whole team, not just whoever owns it
- Hands-on throughout: your team does the work and we coach
- Recorded, with a short written reference they keep
- Repeatable — book one per module as you roll each one out
The cheapest way to find out whether you need any of the engagements below.
Agentic Oversight Setup
For a team that is ready to deploy agents, or has already deployed AI agents, and now needs to know how to govern them. We review what you have — or what you are about to stand up — and show your people how to run it in GOVERNBOX.
- Review of your agent inventory, or of the agents you are about to put live
- Where human-in-the-loop checkpoints and approval gates actually belong
- Your incident playbook pressure-tested against real agent failure modes
- What a board and an auditor will ask about autonomy, and how to answer
Informed by agentic systems running in production, not a whitepaper.
Stand up the program — when there is no one to hand it to yet
Guided Launch
Your governance program, stood up with you rather than for you. We work alongside your team through the whole build, so the people who will own it afterwards are the people who built it.
- Facilitated platform setup across all 5 modules, with your team at the keyboard
- Stakeholder interviews across leadership, IT, program and legal
- Sector-aware policy calibration and review
- Board-ready documentation walkthrough
- Staff training and acceptable-use sign-off rollout
Includes a full year of Starter (the AI foundation plus one management module) if you don't already have a subscription — a $3,500 value, built into the fee. We set up whichever modules your plan carries.
Custom Governance Integration
The deep one. GOVERNBOX mapped onto an existing GRC, IT and audit estate that already has its own rules, its own owners and its own history — rather than onto a reference architecture nobody actually runs.
- Custom control mappings across every framework you actually answer to
- AI and technology inventory built from your real stack, not a questionnaire
- Risk-register taxonomy reconciled with the one your auditors already accept
- Identity, security and reporting workflow integration
- Your team trained on maintaining the mappings once we are gone
Fit: regulated organizations with existing GRC, IT or audit obligations to reconcile.
How to read the prices. They step with how much of the work is ours. A session answers one decision; a half-day trains your team on one module; Agentic Oversight advises a team whose program is already running. Guided Launch is the only one that stands the whole thing up, and at $12,500 it includes a year of the platform. Custom Governance Integration is the one genuinely large engagement, because reconciling an existing audited estate is the hardest work we do. For comparison: a consultant charges $15,000–$25,000 to assemble a governance program out of parts and leaves you a PDF. One engagement here reaches that band — and it leaves you a mapped, running system your own team maintains.
Nonprofit rates: Executive Strategy Session $1,200 · Half-Day Training $2,400 · Agentic Oversight Setup $4,400 · Guided Launch $10,000 · Custom Governance Integration $16,000. The nonprofit rate is public and selectable at checkout — for an engagement, tell us in the inquiry and it is quoted at that rate.
The training program — one half-day per module
Each module gets its own half-day, taught on your own data rather than a demo tenant. Run one before you commit to anything larger, or run all 5 over a quarter as you roll the modules out. Up to 25 people per session, recorded, $3,000 each.
AI Governance
Logging AI tools as use cases with named owners and review dates, running the prohibited-use screen, setting risk tiers, generating a policy and taking it through approval, and reading the crosswalk to find what is still uncovered.
Enterprise Risk Management
Building the register out of guided discovery, scoring likelihood against impact, assigning treatments and owners, and putting key risk indicators on a review cadence somebody actually keeps.
IT Inventory & Management
Standing up the device, software and systems registers, catching shadow IT through the intake lane, and running access reviews and offboarding so no account is left open behind a leaver.
Data Management
Classifying what you hold, mapping flows and cross-border transfers, setting retention schedules with real disposal dates, and working a data subject request against its legal clock.
Privacy
What HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA actually oblige you to do, generating the privacy policy, handling a privacy-typed incident, and what a notice has to say before you rely on it.
Bundling all 5 modules is a scoping conversation, not a listed price — most organizations should space them out rather than buy them at once.
Fractional Governance Officer
A quarterly cadence after any engagement — board reporting reviewed and presented, program health checks, and a regulatory watch across the jurisdictions you operate in. 3-month minimum. Requires an active GOVERNBOX subscription, because we are advising your team on running a program — so there has to be a program.
Consultants leave a PDF. We leave a team that can run it.
We do not build your program and hand it over — that is the model that leaves you dependent. We work through it with your team, in your own environment, so the people who will still be here next quarter are the ones who know how it was built and why. Advisory ends. The capability does not.
| What we work through together | What your team can do once we leave |
|---|---|
| AI use-case inventory and named owners | Log a new tool, assign an owner, and run the review cycle without asking anyone |
| Policies, committee charter and acceptable-use standard | Regenerate a policy when the law moves, and explain every clause's citation to an auditor |
| Risk register and scoring method | Score, treat and retire risks on their own judgment, not ours |
| Impact assessment process | Run an assessment on a new system start to finish, unaided |
| Technology and data inventory | Keep renewals, retention dates and shadow AI current as a routine, not a project |
| The board briefing and the story behind it | Present it themselves next quarter, and answer the follow-up questions |
An authored control library, not a template pack.
Every engagement is delivered against the same library the platform runs on — written by hand, versioned, cited clause by clause, and maintained as the law moves. This is the part a consulting deck cannot leave behind.
Including all 6 dedicated U.S. state AI laws, plus specific statutes from 28 states — across 91 versioned source files and all 5 modules. Every generated clause cites a control by ID, so anything we produce with you can be traced back to the line it came from.
Your consultant may be cheaper. They will not be a system of record.
The people who wrote it.
GOVERNBOX.ai Advisory Services is delivered by the leadership of Gradient Descent LLC, the parent firm of GOVERNBOX.ai. You are not getting a certified partner reading from the manual. You are getting the people who wrote it.
A former federal Chief Information Officer, Chief AI Officer and Chief Privacy Officer (SES) who ran governance, cybersecurity and privacy programs at four U.S. agencies and deployed first-of-kind agentic AI systems in production.
Two decades directing large-scale technology portfolios, enterprise risk management and applied machine learning — which is why the control library is authored and versioned the way it is, rather than assembled from templates.
D.Eng. candidate in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, George Washington University · Forbes Technology Council
Gradient Descent LLC is an independent company. GOVERNBOX.ai is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced on behalf of any government agency.
Looking for something that isn’t tied to the software? Enterprise technology strategy, board advisory, and executive risk counsel sit with the parent firm, Gradient Descent LLC. This page is strictly GOVERNBOX implementation and oversight.
Already working with a GOVERNBOX partner? They lead. We will refer you to a partner on request, and we do not go looking for our partners’ clients. If you would rather work with us directly, we will — that is your call to make, not ours.
The ones worth asking first.
Doesn't this contradict “no consultant needed”?
Fair challenge. The platform genuinely does replace the consulting engagement for most organizations, and that claim stands. Advisory exists for the minority who have no internal owner, a board demanding independence, or a deadline measured in weeks. If none of those describe you, buy the subscription — we will say so directly rather than sell you an engagement.
Do I need a GOVERNBOX subscription to hire you?
For the strategy session, no — book it and pay for it on its own. For Guided Launch and the retainer, yes: we are advising your team on how to run a program in the platform, so there has to be a platform. Guided Launch includes a year of Starter if you don't already have one.
What happens when the engagement ends?
Nothing is handed over, because nothing was ever ours to hand. Your team did the work with us in your own environment. When we leave, the people who own the program are the people who built it — and they keep running it on your subscription.
Why is the price on the page?
Same reason every platform price is. You shouldn't need a discovery call to learn a number, and a page that hides one is behaving like the thing we sell against.
Is there a nonprofit rate?
Yes — 20% off, the same rate as the platform. The nonprofit rate is public and selectable at checkout; for an engagement, tell us in the inquiry and it is quoted at the nonprofit rate.
Who actually does the work?
The leadership of Gradient Descent LLC, the firm that authored the control library. Not a subcontracted delivery team, and not a certified partner working from a playbook.
Tell us where the program stands.
No deck, no discovery phase — a working session. Tell us what is in front of you and which engagement looks right, and we will confirm the scope or tell you that you don’t need us.
Tell us where the program stands
No deck and no discovery phase. Tell us what is in front of you and which engagement looks right, and we will confirm the scope or tell you that you don’t need us.
A person replies within one business day. Scope and price are confirmed in writing before anything is invoiced.
- We reply within one business day, from a person.
- If a session is the right start, you can put it on the calendar yourself — no gate.
- If the subscription is the right answer instead, we say so and point you at the trial.
- Scope and price are confirmed in writing before anything is invoiced.
GOVERNBOX.ai Advisory Services is a trade name of Gradient Descent LLC. Engagements help your team produce a defensible, documented governance program that you review, approve and own. Nothing here is legal advice, and no engagement makes an organization legally compliant.