Private AI workspaces, engineered around how your business already runs.
Civic North designs, builds, and installs AI workspaces for small firms, studios, nonprofits, and civic organizations where the owner or director still holds the standard. Each workspace is a documented system: a knowledge base, tested skills, connected workflows, and approval points, installed in your own account. You keep every part of it.
The result is practical. More of the work gets finished to your standard, and less of it depends on you remembering every step.
What a workspace is made of
Six kinds of component, connected inside your account. Simple builds use two or three. A Flagship build can use all six.
Knowledge base
Your offers, prices, policies, voice, and process, written down once in guides you can read and edit.
Skills
Packaged methods that each produce one specific piece of finished work in your voice, tested against your real examples.
Workflows
Skills connected in order to the tools you already use, run on demand or on a schedule, with approval points where judgment matters.
Tools
Small working applications inside the workspace, such as estimators, trackers, and intake forms.
Products
Your expertise packaged outward: a newsletter rhythm, a profile that shows what you do, client resources.
Loops
Corrections you make while working are captured into the guides, so the same miss does not repeat.
Where an owner's week actually goes
In most owner-run businesses, the skilled work is not the bottleneck. The setup around it is: work that repeats, depends on one person's memory, and starts from zero each time.
- The setup around every job. Finding the last good document, rechecking prices that live in your head, rebuilding the same structure for each new project.
- Onboarding, retyped. The same welcome, the same questions, the same file requests, written again for every client.
- Revision backlogs. Feedback scattered across threads and calls, so every revision starts with rereading the whole project.
- Drafts that sound like everyone. Off-the-shelf AI writes in a generic voice, so you rewrite it, and the tool saves nothing.
How a build runs
Four phases, each with something you review before the next one starts. Nothing is built on a verbal scope.
1. Intelligence brief
Before anything is designed, I document how your business actually runs: offers, prices, voice, recurring work, tools, and where work stalls. You review the brief and correct it.
2. Architecture
The components, connections, permissions, and approval points are drawn and written down, with the price, timeline, and exclusions. Nothing is built until you approve the design.
3. Build and test
Each skill is built from your real examples in Civic North's testing workspace and tested against them until it meets the standard you set.
4. Delivery
Before handoff, the workspace passes a security check of your account settings and a set of acceptance tests. It is installed with you, in your account, with a plain-language guide for every skill and training on live work.
Civic North is one person by design. I take two builds at a time, so the person who scopes your workspace is the person who builds it.
Security and ownership, designed in
These are design constraints on every build, not settings added at the end.
Your account, your files
The workspace is built in your own AI account. Files, prompts, templates, and guides are yours from day one, and stay if the engagement ends.
No credentials held
Civic North never holds a client password. You sign in, and you connect each tool through its normal sign-in prompt, during a screen-shared install.
Least access
Each component receives only the access its job requires. Sensitive client records stay out of the build by default.
Human approval
Every workflow names where a person approves. Nothing client-facing sends itself.
A written record
Every install ends with a plain-language record of what was installed and what it connects to.
Tested on your work
Representative examples from your practice are the test set. A skill is done when it handles your real inputs to your standard.
Engagements and published prices
Every engagement is scoped in writing before work begins. Payment plans are available on projects over $1,000.
- Flagship BuildFrom $8,500 scoped in writing
A mapped, connected system for a practice with complex, high-value work: knowledge extraction, a full workflow map, custom tools, and team training.
- Personal Operating Workspace$2,800 one time
Your knowledge, templates, and tools linked into one system, with a connected workflow, a scheduled workflow, and a correction loop.
- Personal Foundation$1,250 one time
A full business knowledge base and three starter skills, tested on your work and installed with you.
- Workspace CareFrom $600 per month
Monthly maintenance after a build, so the system keeps matching the business.
Want to test the work first?
The Workspace Sprint is $399, fixed. You name one bottleneck, and you receive a solution, plus the reusable skill behind it, a usage guide, and setup instructions, within one business week of complete materials. A reusable skill is a saved method that does the same job well every time: for example, a skill that drafts each new proposal from your rate card and your process, in your voice. The fee is credited toward any build booked within 30 days.
Who builds it
Civic North is the practice of Samantha, based in Stoneham, Massachusetts. For more than fifteen years she has built systems that didn't exist yet: as the first person in a new service coordination role at an elder services nonprofit, she designed the procedures that connected intake, contracts, and more than 80 vendors, and the role grew into a team of four.
Civic North brings the same work to owner-run businesses that have no operations team to do it for them.
Common questions
Do I need to be technical?
No. The workspace runs in plain language inside your own account, and training happens on work you are actually doing.
Who owns the finished workspace?
You do. Files, prompts, templates, and guides are yours, in your account, from the first day. Ownership of a build transfers at final payment.
Will you ever ask for my password?
No. Every sign-in is done by you, on your own account, and every install is done with you by video call, not for you behind the scenes.
What do I pay for separately?
Your own AI account subscription and any tool subscriptions you already hold. The engagement price covers the design, build, testing, guides, install, and training.
How long does a build take?
The timeline is agreed in writing before work begins, based on the number of skills and workflows in the design. The Sprint is delivered within one business week of complete materials.
What if I do not know where to start?
Describe the work that depends too much on you. The first conversation defines the starting point, and sometimes the honest answer is a smaller step than you expected.
Tell me where the work gets stuck
Describe it in your own words. You will hear back within two business days with a recommended first step and a price.
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