One studio, two altitudes.
I’m Alan Goldenberg, and I lead Golem Works. We build AI systems for operations and go-to-market teams buried in manual work, and for studios that need a technical partner on something nobody has built yet. Most of it is unglamorous work that has to survive us leaving. A small amount of it is genuinely new.
The short version
I spent years as the operator inside the company, the one handed the broken process and told to make it work, which turns out to be a useful apprenticeship for this. It also means I have some sympathy for the fact that the person signing the invoice and the person living with the system are two different people with two different problems.
Golem Works started as a side practice alongside that job. It outgrew the evenings, and this year it became the whole thing. I’m based in Coral Springs, Florida, and we work with clients across North America.
Two altitudes
At one end there is a national distributor, where we ran an AI audit first and then built out the systems with the fastest payback, one phase at a time. There is also a venture firm on monthly retainer, where the work is intake and routing and reconciliation, which is ordinary plumbing done carefully enough that nobody has to think about it again.
At the other end is the frontier work, some of it direct and some white-label inside another studio’s client engagements. I product-led a voice-native interactive storytelling experience for a Fortune 100 device platform’s voice assistant. Real-time generative world models, full voice navigation, generated scenes, a live control panel for demos. I worked directly with the client’s PMs on the experience design and ran the evaluations on video, avatar and voice vendors. I’m under NDA, so that’s the level of detail you get.
I do both on purpose. The frontier work keeps me current on what this generation of models can carry, which shifts every few months and is hard to know secondhand. The operations work is where I learn what breaks, and it is almost always something like a PDF that does not match the template arriving at nine on a Monday.
Who you’ll be working with
Golem Works is led by me, Alan Goldenberg. I scope every engagement, I am on the calls, and I answer for what ships. Larger builds are staffed from a senior bench I have worked with for years, and it tends to be the same handful of people from project to project. You will know who is on yours.
Whoever builds a piece of your system is someone you have talked to about it. Continuity is handled structurally rather than by promise. Your code lives in your repository, your keys live in your accounts, and every build ships with documentation a competent contractor could pick up cold. Nothing about your system depends on keeping us around.
How we work
- You talk to the people building it. You end up in a channel with whoever is writing the code, which is faster for everyone and means requirements stop getting relayed through a third person.
- Something working in two weeks. The first thing we hand over is a system you can open and use, however small.
- We write down what it won’t do. Every build ships with the list of cases it hands back to a human, which is the part most vendors leave for you to discover.
- We fix the process before we automate it. Several of our better results have been a rewritten form, one rule, and a deleted step.
- We measure the before. Whatever number we are trying to move, we write down where it stands today, so that afterwards there is something to compare against.
- Fixed scope, fixed price, per phase. You approve each phase on its own, against a number agreed before it starts.
Start a conversation
If you have a workflow eating a day a week, or an idea nobody is sure is possible yet, those are both the right conversation.