# Sonata Agency

> AI consultancy for small and mid-sized businesses. We diagnose where AI fits, prescribe the workflows that pay back, and build only the ones we both agree on. The first conversation is free, takes twenty minutes, and tells you in dollars what AI is worth in your business. Tagline: "AI clarity, for businesses too small to guess."

Site: https://sonata.agency  ·  Contact: hello@sonata.agency

Headquartered in Dubai; primary market is the MENA region (GCC, Levant, North Africa). Working languages: English and Arabic. Engagements outside MENA are taken by fit, not by default. Time zone GST (UTC+4), overlapping EU and APAC.

We measure first (free diagnostic), prescribe second (paid 12-20 page Application Map), and build only the workflows the map prescribed (fixed-fee, instrumented, each shipped with a written kill-criterion — the metric that would tell us to shut a workflow down).

What we won't build: autonomous sales agents that close deals (closing requires accountability); custom fine-tuned models for SMBs (RAG plus good prompts wins at this scale and costs 5-10x less to maintain); customer-facing regulated advice in legal, medical, or financial domains; "AI to replace your team" (we sell augmentation, not headcount cuts).

## How we work

- [Methodology](https://sonata.agency/methodology): Three stages of AI work, in order. Free diagnostic, paid Application Map, fixed-fee Build.
- [About Sonata](https://sonata.agency/about): Founder Ingemar Svensson, the principal-plus-network model, and the Dubai / MENA focus.
- [AI readiness diagnostic](https://sonata.agency/diagnose): Free, 10 minutes, calibrated 0-100 score across data / process / people / strategy with a written report emailed to you.

## Pattern catalog (42 workflows)

- [Full pattern catalog](https://sonata.agency/patterns): The 42 AI workflow patterns we ship. Each pattern is a portable capability spec (requirements, runtime flow, emissions), not a vendor pitch.
- [Customer communications](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/customer-comms): 6 patterns.
- [Sales & revenue](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/sales-and-revenue): 6 patterns.
- [Knowledge & search](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/knowledge): 5 patterns.
- [Operations](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/operations): 7 patterns.
- [Finance](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/finance): 5 patterns.
- [People & HR](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/people): 4 patterns.
- [Content & marketing](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/content): 5 patterns.
- [Data & analysis](https://sonata.agency/patterns/category/data): 4 patterns.

## Field notes

- [Why we won’t build you an AI sales agent.](https://sonata.agency/notes/no-ai-sales-agent): Every week we turn down a request for an “AI that closes deals for us.” The pitch is intuitive: AI is good at language, sales is mostly language, therefore. The reasoning doesn’t hold, and here’s why we’ve seen it fail.
- [The most boring AI workflow we ship is the highest-ROI.](https://sonata.agency/notes/boring-document-extraction): It isn’t a chatbot. It isn’t an agent. It’s a system that reads PDFs of invoices and puts the data in your ERP. Document extraction has a 3-5 month payback in every shape of business we’ve scoped it for. Here’s why.
- [Three AI projects per fifty-person SMB. We’re sure about the number.](https://sonata.agency/notes/three-projects-per-smb): Clients often ask us to scope ten initiatives. We talk most of them down to three. The reason isn’t conservatism, it’s arithmetic. Beyond about three concurrent AI workflows, an SMB without dedicated AI ops capacity loses more to operational drag than they gain in throughput.
- [The kill criterion is the contract.](https://sonata.agency/notes/kill-criterion-is-the-contract): Every Build engagement we sign includes a written kill-criterion: the metric that would tell us to shut a workflow down. The honest version of this is more useful than any guarantee, and it’s the thing that separates us from consultancies that bill regardless of outcome.

## Contact

- [Email Sonata](mailto:hello@sonata.agency): hello@sonata.agency.
- [Take the diagnostic](https://sonata.agency/diagnose): The entry point — free, ten minutes, the report is yours either way.

## Optional

- [Full LLM corpus](https://sonata.agency/llms-full.txt): Long-form companion with the inline text of every major page and pattern.
- [Sitemap](https://sonata.agency/sitemap.xml): All indexable pages on the site.
- [Pattern catalog API (JSON)](https://api.sonata.agency/api/patterns): Live machine-readable catalog. Schema version 0.4-draft, catalog version 1.1.
- [Vocabularies API (JSON)](https://api.sonata.agency/api/patterns/vocabularies): Controlled vocabularies used by the catalog (business shapes, access patterns, complexity bands, regulatory concerns, engagement roles, kill-metric types).