Think of a tailor cutting a suit. The questions, the measuring, the cloth, the cutting, the fitting, the adjustments. You can follow every step of it — and at no point does anyone expect you to start cutting your own cloth.
That’s the arrangement here. I find the work AI can genuinely carry in your business and I fit it there, explaining every step as I go. By the end, AI is doing real work for you, and nothing in the getting there was a mystery.
Teaching yourself AI is no longer the only way in.
The claims and the fearmongering are everywhere. So are the off-the-peg tools. And the courses, which take your problem and hand it straight back to you with homework attached. What remains rare is the useful version: AI quietly and competently carrying part of a real business. The technology has been ready for a while now. What isn’t ready, in most companies, is the description of the company itself — and that turns out to be the harder half.
That is what I do, and it’s all I do.
How I work
No two engagements are the same, but the shape stays the same. The flow and order is critical. It's the aspect of the process that generic will never give you.
1The opening conversation
We talk. You tell me about the business, I tell you honestly whether I think AI can do useful work in it. No proprietary detail, nothing to sign, nothing to pay.
2The NDA
Before you share anything proprietary, I sign a non-disclosure agreement you control. The work ahead depends on your willingness to show me how your business actually runs, so your comfort with that comes first.
3The scope
We agree, in writing, exactly what the project covers, what it costs, and how long it lives. Details will evolve — much of what gets built emerges from Discovery — but you’ll know what you’re buying before we start.
4The discovery
Concentrated, immersive and thorough: what you do, in what order, under what rules, where the opportunity is, where the pain is, and which work can move onto AI’s shoulders. It ends in a full written report — your company, set down properly. Everything after this stands on it.your company, not for an average of companies. Accompanied by a full report.
5The build
What gets built follows from what Discovery found and sits on top of it: your company’s way of working, done by your company’s tools, held to the definitions you agreed. Explained before, during and after, so by the end you know what you own, what it does, and why.
6The retainer
Businesses move. Definitions change, people leave, a new product doesn’t fit the old categories — and an account of a company that nobody maintains quietly stops matching the company. Because AI fails politely rather than loudly, that can go unnoticed for months. I stay on to keep it true, and to keep what I built effective as your company and the technology move. The NDA stays in force.
My story
I spent thirty-five years in brand and positioning for global corporations — the long discipline of working out what a business really is, and what it’s worth to the people it serves.
Then AI arrived in my industry as a working force, and what struck me wasn’t the disruption. It was the relief. Here was a way to take the repetitive work off people’s desks and leave them doing the thing they’re actually good at. I saw it in my own work first, and I couldn’t unsee it.
The people around me weren’t feeling relief, though. Owners and executives, genuinely good at what they do, quietly worried about falling behind — because keeping up had become a full-time job nobody hired them to do. The limiting factor in all of this is no longer which AI system you use. Those are close to interchangeable, and they improve without anyone’s help. The limiting factor is whether a company can say clearly what it does, what its terms mean, and where its lines are. That is not an engineering problem. It is the problem I have spent thirty-five years solving, under an older name.
That’s what The Context Forge is: a long career spent understanding businesses, applied to the newest problem they have.
— Trevor Gilchrist
A fifteen minute chat. Pick a time that suits you:
Telephone
Booking asks for your name and email so the meeting can reach your calendar — that is all they are used for. Never sold, never shared.