An old discipline, applied to a new category of spending.
DirectSourceAI exists because someone has to tell the truth about corporate AI spending, and almost no one in this market is positioned to do it without a conflict of interest.
Burt Steingraeber
Burt spent three decades as a chief financial officer and senior operating executive, signing the checks, defending the budgets, and sitting through the meetings where someone had to explain a write-off. That experience is the foundation of DirectSourceAI — not a technical credential, but a financial one.
He founded the firm after watching the same pattern repeat across the businesses he advised: real money committed to AI initiatives, real enthusiasm at the outset, and then silence. Not because the technology failed, but because no one asked the basic financial questions before the money moved — the same questions that have separated good investments from bad ones since long before artificial intelligence existed.
We have nothing to gain from the answer.
- DirectSourceAI does not implement AI systems, and never will.
- We accept no referral fees, commissions, or partnership arrangements from AI vendors of any kind.
- Every engagement concludes with a written recommendation the client can act on with any provider they choose — or none at all.
- If a report tells a client nothing they didn't already know, the fee is refunded in full.
Forward-looking about technology. Traditional about judgment.
DirectSourceAI takes AI seriously as a category of business investment — the spending is real, the stakes are real, and ignoring the technology is not a viable strategy for any company competing today. But the discipline applied to evaluating that spending is deliberately old-fashioned: define the outcome, verify the claim, follow the money, and say the hard thing when the hard thing is true. That combination, not any particular technical expertise, is the firm's entire advantage.
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