The thinking layer for consulting delivery

Your timesheets know the hours. Your project tool knows the tasks. Aether knows why.

What was sold, promised and decided lives in email, Slack, documents and calls, and no system holds it. Aether sorts every message onto the engagement it belongs to, checks it against what you sold, and drafts the work that comes out of it: the Friday report, the change order, the follow-up nobody got round to writing.

Book a demoHow it fits

Built for consulting firms of 25–100 people on fixed-fee work. Every claim in every draft opens to a dated, verbatim source you can check.

How it fits

Between the plan and the work, the thinking.

Your firm already runs two systems of record. One counts hours, budget and invoices. The other tracks tasks, owners and due dates. What connects them (why the budget moved, what the client was promised, which settled decision is being quietly re-argued) lives in conversations. Aether is the layer that holds it.

Your timesheetsKnow the hours
  • Hours logged412 h
  • Budget burned80%
  • Billable vs non-billable86 / 14

They know a project is 60% delivered and 80% burned. They can’t tell you why.

Hours and budget in
ReadsEmailDriveSlackCalls
AetherKnows why
  • What was sold, the SOW, and the assumptions the fee was priced on
  • What was promised, commitments, with owners and due dates
  • What was decided, and the moment it's re-argued
  • What changed, including the scope nobody priced
Approved tasks out
Done comes back
ClickUpYour project tool, knows what’s next
  • TaskConfirm the cutover window
  • OwnerDana Reyes
  • Due18 Oct
  • ListAcme Expansion

ClickUp and Asana today. Approved tasks arrive with a link to the promise they came from; from then on the status lives there, and only “done” comes back.

In 60 seconds

What the thinking layer does.

What the layer does

It holds the record, checks it, and writes from it.

01

It knows every engagement

Everyone can read your inbox. Only Aether knows which engagement each message belongs to.

  • Email, Drive, Slack and call transcripts from the notetaker you already use (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom or Read AI), each placed on one engagement
  • Decisions, risks and commitments pulled out with owners and due dates, matched to the people actually staffed
  • Learns what to trust: once a source proves reliable, its high-confidence items file themselves, and accuracy is shown per source
  • Every client's record is walled off from every other, by construction

02

It checks the work against what you sold

The SOW isn't a PDF in a folder. It's what every ask and every message gets checked against.

  • Reads the assumptions the fee was priced on, and tells you when new evidence breaks one, with the client notice already drafted
  • Catches a settled decision being re-argued, with the “as agreed on 12 March” reply ready
  • Spots scope delivered without a change order, and the change order is already drafted, fee left for you
  • Hears the client's next need and hands it to Proposal as a brief

03

It does the work about the work

Every warning arrives with the draft that answers it.

  • A status report waiting every Friday, promised checked against delivered
  • A brief before every client call, leading with what's still open
  • A handover pack the day someone rotates off
  • A RAID log you can export any time, built from the record rather than maintained by hand
ReportingDraft ready

Weekly status — Acme Corp Expansion

Scheduled every Friday · promised checked against delivered

  • DeliveredFeed validation report, 28 Aug
  • DeliveredMapping specification v2, 1 Sep
  • Not deliveredMigration plan and cutover window, promised Thursday
  • UnbilledArchitect coverage through Phase 2
11 source quotes · each opens to its sourceReview draft
Meeting PrepBrief ready

Brief — Acme weekly sync

Before the call · leads with what's still open

  • Still openCutover window, due 3 Sep and overdue
  • Where it standsThree of four feeds validated; the fourth has no export contract
  • Said last timePhase 2 waits until the feed acceptance test passes
  • Don't walk intoThe second dry run nobody has priced
9 source quotesOpen brief
Continuity BriefPack ready

Handover — Dana Reyes rotates off

A living context pack for whoever picks the engagement up

  • Commitments3 open, 1 overdue, each with its owner and date
  • Decisions14 on the record, 1 disputed by the team
  • PeopleWho decides what at Acme, and who has gone quiet
  • WatchSOW §4.2 assumption, contradicted on 9 Sep
26 source quotesOpen pack
RAID logExport

RAID log — Acme Corp Expansion

Built from the record, not maintained by hand

  • Risk2 of 4 source exports still failing
  • AssumptionClient-side data exports by 30 Sep, now contradicted
  • IssueCutover window past its due date
  • DependencyFeed acceptance test before phase 2
updated as the record changesExport

The chief of staff for every engagement

Ask it a question, or ask it for the work.

Ask a question and the answer comes quoted from the record. Ask for work and it starts the agent, or strings several together within a budget you set, and hands the result back for review. When a task works well, save it. It becomes an agent the whole firm can run, versioned and on a schedule.

  • Answers with verbatim quotes, checked word for word against the source
  • Launches any agent from a sentence, scoped to one engagement
  • Multi-step tasks run under a per-run budget, and every output goes to review
  • Save a good task as a firm agent, versioned and triggerable, with its rewrite rate tracked
  • Your own assistant can call it: Claude on desktop, web or phone, Copilot, or your firm's own, over MCP. Switched on by an admin, revocable, and every call logged

Built for the team

A chat window helps one person. An engagement takes a team.

The whole team works from one record of the engagement: who owns what, who has reviewed it, who signed it off, and what was said about it along the way.

Discuss it where it sits

Comment on a decision, a risk or a change order right where it is, and @mention someone. They see it in their queue on Home and by email.

What's new since you last looked

Each engagement's timeline marks what changed since your last visit, so coming back from a week away takes minutes.

Review, then the lead signs off

Ask a teammate to review a report, proposal or change order. The engagement lead's approval is the one that lets it go out.

Every piece of work has an owner

Every engagement has a lead. A task, draft or reminder with no owner lands with that lead, and a morning email says what's waiting to be handed out.

Checked by the people who were there

Teammates confirm or dispute what Aether pulled out of a call or a thread, so the record is vouched for, not just extracted.

Every action on the record

Who approved, sent, assigned, changed or connected what, and when, in one firm-wide activity log.

One record, the whole engagement

Six agents, from the proposal to the handover.

Each runs on a schedule, on a trigger, or when you ask. Point tools cover one moment. Your systems cover the transaction. These cover the reasoning across the whole engagement.

Win it

Proposal

First-draft proposals and SOWs anchored in comparable work you've delivered, your methodology and your pricing philosophy.

See the interface
Prepare

Meeting Prep

A brief before every client call: where things stand, what's still open, what was said last time, and what not to walk into.

See the interface
Report

Reporting

The status report waiting every Friday, promised checked against delivered, with each promise and milestone cited.

See the interface
Protect

Client Risk

Reads the whole client relationship for honest signs you're about to lose the account, with one concrete next step.

See the interface
Grow

Expansion Scout

Finds the scope you delivered and never priced, with the change order drafted, and the next need the client mentioned in passing.

See the interface
Hand over

Continuity Brief

A living context pack per engagement, so a rotation is a handover document rather than an archaeology project.

See the interface

Nothing leaves without you

It reads and drafts on its own. You decide what goes out.

A managing partner can’t put a guessed summary in front of a client. Every promise, milestone and risk in a draft opens to its source, its date and the verbatim excerpt, checked word for word. Where the record can’t answer, Aether says so instead of writing around it. Sending, pushing a task or changing a record waits for one approval from the right person.

  • Drafts first in one queue, ranked by what stops being useful first
  • Capped at ten items, because a longer list gets ignored
  • Gaps surfaced as questions, not filled with confident guesses
  • Unlimited seats, so a warning in a junior's thread still reaches you

Roadmap

Where the layer goes next.

Planned

Retrospective

Looks back across closed engagements for the patterns that repeat, like the SOW clause that always ends in a re-scope, and brings them into the next proposal. De-identified and reviewed by a person before anything is reused.

Planned

More drafts

The post-meeting recap, the steering and quarterly pack, the close-out report, and a de-identified case study at the end of an engagement.

Planned

Constraints, tracked

Hard limits such as a budget cap, a staffing rule or a regulatory boundary, tracked as their own kind of item and checked the way assumptions are.

See the full roadmap or what has already shipped.

Pricing

One number. Every agent included.

Priced per active project, the same unit your time and billing system already counts. Nothing is gated behind a tier, and there’s nothing to negotiate but the count.

33

A 50-person firm runs about 33. Drag to your own count.

Monthly

$1,287 / month

$39 per active project / month

Annual, prepaidSaves 17%

$12,870 / year

$390 per active project / year

Included at every price point

  • Proposal
  • Meeting Prep
  • Reporting
  • Client Risk
  • Expansion Scout
  • Continuity Brief
  • Chief of staff
  • Saved agents
  • RAID log
  • Review and sign-off
  • Activity log
  • MCP access
  • Unlimited user seats
  • All integrations
  • No minimum: pay for the engagements you run
“We don’t charge per seat. Everyone in the firm has it, from analysts to PMs to partners, because a warning buried in a junior’s thread is exactly the one you need caught, and seat rationing guarantees you miss it.”

Questions

Questions you’ll probably ask

  • Your time and billing system counts hours, budget and invoices. It knows a project is 80% burned; it can't tell you the burn started when a settled decision got re-opened on a call in week six. Aether sits beside it and holds the reasoning behind the numbers. It doesn't replace it or write into it, and if your timesheets live in a spreadsheet, the same applies.

  • No. Aether works out what a commitment requires; your project tool is where the work gets done. Today that's ClickUp or Asana. An approved task goes there with its owner, due date and a link back to its source, and from then on its status lives in your tool. Only one thing comes back, done or not done, so there's no two-way sync to fight with.

  • It would be, if it only raised alarms. It replaces the blank page for your status reports, meeting briefs, change orders and handovers, work your team does every week, and every warning it raises arrives with the draft that answers it. If it only did the alerts, we wouldn't buy it either.

  • Keep it; it's good at recaps. But Copilot works at the workspace level and has no concept of an engagement. It can summarise Tuesday's call. It can't draft your Acme status report from that engagement's record, cite every line, and tell you the scope decision on Tuesday contradicts one you settled in March. That's a data-model gap, not a model-quality gap.

  • They remember you. Aether remembers the engagement: what was sold, promised and decided, with the source for each, and each client's record walled off from the others. A general assistant with one memory across thirty clients isn't built for a firm that signs NDAs. And if you like your assistant, keep it. It can call Aether for the engagement record over MCP.

  • Good, we connect to them. We don't record calls. We take the transcripts your notetaker already produces, place each call on the right engagement using the calendar invite, and carry what was said across fourteen weeks, four channels and two staff rotations.

  • For one document, probably. But it doesn't know your service lines, your delivery phases, what you call things internally, or what your firm treats as a risk signal, so it writes competent, generic consulting. Aether captures that once, and every draft after it comes out in your voice, to your standards, with your hard rules applied. And a chat is one person's. In Aether the team works from the same record: drafts go to review and the lead signs off, comments sit on the decision they're about, and every piece of work has an owner.

  • Aether connects to your firm's own workspace, never your client's. Each client's record is walled off from every other, and a document can be marked internal so client-facing drafts never quote it. Retention is set per engagement, with legal hold, and destruction on request with a record of what was destroyed. Every action in Aether is recorded in a firm-wide activity log.

See a Friday report drafted live, on a sample engagement.

Book a demoLog in

Or write tohello@buildaether.com

For consulting firms of 25–100 people, especially on fixed-fee work.