Your Trusted AI Curator™

AI is everywhere.
Clarity is rare.

I help Irish professional services firms find exactly where AI moves the needle, before they spend serious money finding out the hard way.

Book your Orientation Watch the AI Archetypes →
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Sound familiar?

Every week, another announcement.
Another tool. Another reason to feel behind.

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We've been sold tools built for someone twice our size, in a different market. You can tell.

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We're worried about spending serious budget on something our team won't use. Again.

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Our clients are starting to question fees for work they assume AI should handle by now. We don't have a good answer yet — and we know that conversation is coming.

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Our proposals take three days to write and still sound like everyone else's.

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Too much of our time goes on work that will never appear on an invoice.

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We tested a few of the tools. The moment someone asked whether client data was going to US servers, we quietly stopped.

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The problem isn't AI.
The problem is that nobody's made any of this specific to you.

Irish professional services firms deserve honest AI advice, not sales pitches.

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The Solution

Start with the Census

Too much of a firm's time goes on work that will never appear on an invoice. The report reformatted for the third time. The notes from a call that never got written up. The follow-up nobody logged, and the chasing — endless chasing — for something already agreed weeks ago. Every firm that sells its expertise carries a version of this, and most of it is documentation and donkey work. The Census counts that work — properly, with the people who actually do it in the room.

One day inside your firm, facilitated by me. Analogue only: no computers in the room, so nothing leaves it. A printed roll runs the length of the boardroom table and fills up with your own people's handwriting, and at the end of the day the roll stays with you.

Nobody signs anything on the day. You get a written Blueprint within 48 hours and five working days to decide, with the price held. If the honest answer turns out to be "not yet", the day and the Blueprint are still yours to keep.

The Census is €1,850, credited in full against a deployment inside 90 days. It's the cheapest "not yet" a firm can buy — and the most useful.

See How a Census Day Runs
95%
of enterprise AI projects fail

Not because the technology doesn't work. Because the people who had to use it every day were nowhere near the room when it was designed. Somebody picked a solution before anybody had properly understood the problem, and what got built ended up solving something else entirely.

The Census is designed to put you in the successful 5%. It counts the work with your frontline staff standing over the table — before a single euro goes near a solution.

Source: MIT / Fortune, 2025 ↗

Are you a good fit?

Is this you?

I work best with a particular kind of firm. Tick whatever rings true.

Then you're the sort of firm I do my best work with.

The next step is the Orientation Session: one conversation, €450, and a one-page written summary within 48 hours that's yours to keep. No sales pitch, and no commitment beyond that one session.

Worth knowing:

You don't need a technical background. The Census is designed for business owners and their teams, not developers. No computers in the room.

Your systems and data don't need to be perfect. Part of the day is understanding what you actually have to work with.

Book your Orientation

The Process

Three steps. You can stop after any of them.

There's no long engagement to sign up to and no discovery phase that quietly becomes the project. Each step stands on its own, and each one ends with you knowing something you didn't know that morning. The firms I work with all have one thing in common: they produce a great deal of documentation, and a great deal of good work never reaches an invoice.

One hour · €450

1

The Orientation Session

Online or in person. You bring the situation you're actually in — what's landing on your desk, what keeps slipping, what you've already tried and quietly abandoned. I tell you plainly whether AI helps here at all. If it does, I'll say where it would help first. If it doesn't, you'll hear that too, and it will save you a fortune. A one-page written summary follows within 48 hours.

No preparation needed. Bring the mess.

One day in your office · €1,850

2

The Census

A full day inside the firm with your people in the room, frontline as well as management. No laptops — card, pen, and a printed roll that runs the length of the boardroom table. Between us, your people and I count the work that never appears on an invoice: the chasing, the drafting, the reporting, the follow-up. Then it gets weighed. By the end of the day you'll have decided what's worth handing over first — and it's rarely the thing anyone guessed that morning. The roll stays with you. So does the Blueprint, a written plan in your hands within 48 hours.

Fully credited if you deploy within 90 days

Within a fortnight of a seat opening

3

The Mercurious Fleet

If the Blueprint says go: the basic fleet deployed on your own accounts and your own keys, doing the work the Census counted. Not one assistant — a team that already works together. I configure them to your firm, watch them, and improve them month by month. One new agent a quarter, chosen by you at the Quarterly Count — never a monthly build treadmill. I hold ten firms at a time and a seat only opens when one leaves, so this step starts with a conversation rather than a price on a page.

Your accounts, your keys, your data. Managed by me.

Nobody signs anything on the day. The Census ends with a direction — deploy, not yet, or something smaller — and then five working days to talk it over properly, with the price held. Your team's only job is to be in the room. Everything between the steps is mine.

An honest "not yet" saves more than a bad yes.
Some firms finish the Census and the right answer is to wait. They keep the day, the roll and the Blueprint — and they've spent a day finding out rather than a year.

Orientation €450. The Census €1,850, credited in full if you go ahead within 90 days. The Fleet is a conversation.

Book your Orientation

What you get back

More than time.

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The manual work decreases. That's the part you'd expect. The benefit most people don't expect is the weight that goes with it, the part you probably didn't even realise you were carrying.

The Friday report that used to eat two hours is in your drafts folder by Thursday night, checked, structured, and ready for you to look over.

The salesperson walks into the customer meeting with a briefing built from the last three call notes. Key concerns, open questions, what was promised last time.

The emails that would have piled up by 9am have suggested replies already waiting. Yours to send, change, or ignore. But there.

You get the time back. The less obvious part is what happens in your head. There's a part of your brain that runs in the background all day, keeping a mental list of what still needs to be done, tensing up every time a deadline rolls around on cue. You didn't notice it because it had always been there. Think of Pavlov's dogs. Every Friday morning the bell rings and your team braces. Once the work is already done when they arrive, the bracing stops. The bell still rings. Nobody flinches.

The hours you get back don't just fill up again. They go towards the work that was worth doing all along, the conversation you kept pushing back, the decision you never had the headspace for.

At some point the question in the room changes. It's no longer whether this was worth doing. It's where to do it next. When you hear that conversation, you know your first AI initiative worked.

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Book your Orientation

Start here

You don't have to start at the top.

Four ways in, in order of commitment. Most firms watch from the free end for a while, then buy an hour of my honest opinion, then count the work properly. Some go straight to the count. Either is fine. The one thing I'd rather you didn't do is spend serious money finding out the hard way.

Start here — free

The Cabinet of AI Curiosities™ & the Fleet Log

Two series, both free. The Mercurious Fleet Log is running now — a weekly build-in-public from a 1938 cottage in the Irish midlands. Three to five minutes: what I built this week, what broke, and what it would mean for a firm like yours. The Cabinet of AI Curiosities™ arrives around October — one human desire per episode, told as a story, with the hype separated out from the useful.

Free — a new Fleet Log every Friday
Watch the Fleet Log →
Before anything else

The Orientation Session

One conversation, online or in person. You tell me where the work is piling up. I tell you plainly what AI would do about it, what it wouldn't, and what I'd do first if the firm were mine. You get a one-page written summary within 48 hours — yours to keep, whether or not you ever work with me again.

€450
Book your Orientation
Count it properly

The Census

One facilitated day inside your firm, counting the work that never reaches an invoice — the chasing, the drafting, the reporting, the follow-up that quietly eats a Thursday. Your people in the room, because they're the ones who know where it goes. Analogue only: no laptops, no recording, a printed roll down the boardroom table that stays with you. A written Blueprint follows within 48 hours. Nobody signs anything on the day.

€1,850 — credited in full if you deploy within 90 days
Book your Orientation
Where it's heading

The Mercurious Fleet

A small team of AI agents, deployed inside your firm and looked after month to month. Between them they take on the work the Census counted — the follow-ups, the drafting, the chasing, the reporting — and hand it back to you finished. My own practice has been running on them for months before yours ever will.

Ten client seats, and that's the whole of it. A seat opens when a client leaves, so the queue matters: firms waiting take the Orientation and the Census while they wait, which means deployment starts within a fortnight of a seat opening. Accounts and API keys stay in your name and I manage them — your information never lives with me. One new agent per quarter, chosen by you at the Quarterly Count, never a monthly build treadmill. And if you ever leave, you keep the machine; you'd only be cancelling the mechanic.

I'm building the roster in public through the summer and into the autumn, with Mercurious as client zero. An agent joins the client-facing roster only after it has served my own firm first. Nothing reaches yours that hasn't already survived mine.

Ten seats. Priced in conversation, not on a page.
Book your Orientation

The Mercurious Fleet

A small team of agents for the work that never reaches an invoice.

Follow-ups. Drafting. Reporting. Chasing. Summarising. The work a firm has to do to keep functioning, and that no client has ever been billed for. The Fleet is a handful of AI agents deployed inside your firm to carry that load — set up, watched, and improved every month. Not a licence you're left to figure out on your own.

My own practice runs on one. Five agents, working together, today — not a demo and not a pilot. One of them, the Archivist, keeps what the firm knows, so the things that matter stop living only in somebody's head. Another, the Profiler, learns how the firm sounds from its own sent work, and drafts in that voice instead of a chatbot's. A third, the Argus, watches the lot and tells me each morning what actually needs me, and what doesn't.

That's the basic fleet, and it's the smallest thing I'll deploy. One assistant on its own is a gadget; these already work together, and they've done months of real work on my own business before they go anywhere near yours. Nothing reaches your firm that hasn't already survived mine.

They have names. I'm aware that's a bit much for software. It stuck anyway, mostly because people find it easier to say "the Archivist has that" than to recite a workflow name nobody remembers. The fleet grows one agent at a time, one a quarter, chosen by you at the Quarterly Count.

How the Fleet works

Ten seats. That's the whole list.

I keep ten client seats and no more. A seat opens only when a client leaves. It's not a marketing device — ten is what one person can look after properly, and I'd rather say no than say yes badly.

The waiting list works while it waits.

Queuing doesn't mean sitting idle. You take the Orientation Session, then the Census, while you wait. By the time a seat opens the counting is done and the Blueprint is written, so deployment starts within a fortnight.

Your accounts. Your keys. My job to manage them.

Every account and API key belongs to your firm, set up in your name and managed by me. Your data never lives with Mercurious. That matters more in a professional services firm than anywhere else, and it's the first question a sensible client asks.

One new agent a quarter.

At the Quarterly Count I show you what the agents actually did, and you pick the next one from the ideas you parked along the way. One a quarter, not a monthly build treadmill. The limit isn't how fast I can build — it's how much change a firm can absorb without the whole thing being ignored.

Leaving is meant to be dignified.

If you stop, you keep everything — the agents, the accounts, the configuration, the lot. You keep the machine; you'd be cancelling the mechanic. No hostage-taking, and nothing switched off to make the point.

Nothing arrives untested.

Mercurious is client zero. Every agent runs on my own work first, and only joins the client roster once it has earned it. I'm building this in public through the summer and into the autumn, failures included — you can watch the whole thing before you decide anything.

You'll notice there's no price on this one. The shape of it: an implementation at the start, then a monthly fee with the monitoring, the training and the support already in it. The implementation is real work and it's charged for — the roster configured around your firm, your work and the way you actually do it. The monthly climbs with the number of people the fleet is looking after, because more people means more requests, more approvals and more attention. It isn't a licence per head. What you're not paying for is a bespoke software build. The fleet already exists and runs my own practice before it goes anywhere near yours, so there's no long development project to fund, and no year of waiting to find out whether it was worth it. The Census settles the actual numbers honestly, before anybody commits to anything.

Ask About a Fleet Seat

Latest AI Archetype Video

The Cabinet of AI Curiosities™.

Each artefact illustrates one AI use case — told as a story, explained plainly, and connected to what it might mean for a business like yours. Made for the genuinely curious. A new artefact added regularly.

▶

✦   First archetype coming soon   ✦

Episode 01

Coming Soon

A short description of this archetype will appear here — what it does, what human capability it mirrors, and what it could mean for your business.

3–7 min Free
Watch the Series →
Rob Abbey — Founder, Mercurious.ai

The Curator

Rob Abbey

Education First. Rob's approach starts before implementation. Most AI initiatives fail not because the technology doesn't work, but because the people expected to use it were never helped to understand it. AI is still new enough to be intimidating, and intimidating enough to be avoided. His job, before anything else, is to change that — to work through what AI can and cannot do for a specific business until everyone in the room can see it clearly. The solutions that stick are the ones the team helped to shape. That process starts with education, not implementation.

The AI landscape right now is a museum with three million rooms and no map. New models every week. New tools every day. Breathless announcements from people trying to sell you something.

A good curator doesn't overwhelm you. They take you past the obvious, stop you in front of the thing you'd have walked straight past, and show you the two or three things that are actually relevant to your situation right now.

That's what Rob does for you. He spent a decade in US technology — the first six years at ClickFunnels, one of the most successful bootstrapped business automation platforms of its era, where he joined as part of the small initial team and watched users grow from 6,500 to over 100,000. From sales and marketing automation to AI automation. The second half went deep: chatbots, voicebots, prediction models, an AI-first CRM, an NLP-to-LLM migration — in a business with $10M+ ARR. Real products. Real users. Real consequences when they break.

He left that world deliberately to build something more considered — an independent AI consultancy built for businesses like yours.

Here's what that experience means in practice:

  • 10+ years building sales and marketing automation and AI products at commercial scale
  • Principal AI Product Manager at a $10M+ ARR company — scaled an AI product from 1 location to 200+ locations with hundreds of users across a single organisation
  • Certified to run AI Design Sprints® for Products & Services, Process, and Generative AI by 33A.ai — an internationally recognised AI innovation firm
  • Certified in AI Product Management — Product School
  • Trained in cutting-edge agentic AI development and Agentic Doc Gen with Tyler Fisk and Sara Davison — AI Build Lab
  • Creator of the AI Archetypes video series
  • Based in Athlone, Ireland — working remote-first since 2014

Why Mercurious?

Mercury × Curious

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Mercury was the Roman god of commerce, communication, and speed. That speed also applied to quick thinking. Above all else, Mercury was the one the other gods sent when a task demanded both pace and intelligence. If the Romans had known about AI, Mercury, undoubtedly, would have been the god they chose to represent it.

Mercurious is a portmanteau, a merger of two words: the word Mercury merged with the word curious. Because the most important thing you bring to AI isn't technical knowledge, it's the willingness to stay curious about what it can and cannot do.

Together they describe what this work demands: moving fast, staying curious, in an industry that moves faster than almost anything before it.

Mercury, archetypes, a Cabinet of Curiosities. None of it is accidental. AI is full of jargon built to impress rather than explain. The historical framing strips that away and replaces it with something we already understand.

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Rob is not a developer, he is an orchestrator. He designs AI products, builds automations, and coordinates the people and strategy to make them work. That includes knowing when AI shouldn't be involved at all, when the task needs a human, the decision needs a leader, or the moment simply isn't right.

For your business, that means someone who designs the right solution, involves your team, and knows when to say not yet.

How I Work

I arrive with an open mind, ten years of knowing which questions matter, and the frameworks to act on what I find.

People support what they help to create.

This isn't a motivational poster. It's the reason 95% of enterprise AI projects fail (MIT / Fortune, 2025). The C-Suite approves. The consultant delivers. The staff resist. Nothing changes. The people who have to use it every day were never in the room.

The Socratic method, not the slide deck.

Every organisation already holds most of the knowledge needed to solve its own problems. The people on the ground know where the friction is. They know what takes too long. They know what falls through the cracks every single week. They're the ones doing the Sisyphean work — pushing the same boulder up the same hill, every single day. The repetitive task nobody has ever questioned because that's just how it's done. They already know where AI could change that. They just haven't been asked.

Build for now, not for later.

A fleet doing real work this quarter is worth more than a comprehensive AI strategy nobody implements. Build with what exists right now — it is already enough, and it will be cheaper and better next year anyway.

Today is the most expensive it will ever be.

The cost of running AI only goes one direction. The risk of waiting is higher than the risk of building. Start now.

Everyone in the room is afraid AI will take their jobs.

"The best way I know to take the fear away is to involve people in building the solution themselves. When you've helped design it, when your knowledge is baked into it, when it reflects your workflows and your language — it doesn't feel like a threat. It feels like a tool you made. Because it is."
95%

of enterprise AI projects fail — not because the technology doesn't work, but because the people who had to use it every day weren't in the room when it was designed.

MIT / Fortune, 2025 ↗

80%

of AI projects fail to deliver expected benefits — not due to the technology, but due to lack of user adoption.

NTT DATA, 2024 ↗

Don't take my word for it

A decade in US technology. From automation software to AI.

From sales and marketing automation to AI products — here's what the people who worked alongside him had to say.

"Rob worked closely with some of our largest clients to understand their needs and ensured that the product delivered real, measurable value. His ability to deliver results made a huge impact on our team and company. I would absolutely work with him again without hesitation."
Wayne Steiner
CTO, 4 Walls — managed Rob directly
"Working with Rob at Respage was an absolute pleasure. His openness made it possible for us to work closely with key customers and turn trials into long-term adoption. Every product he builds is thoughtfully constructed to last, with the customer's best interest at the centre."
Melanie Gibson
Sales & Account Management, Respage
"We shipped more than 10 products and big features together. What stands out about Rob is how he mixes deep product knowledge with empathy and calm leadership. He listens, asks the right questions, and really gets the technical side — which makes working with him easy and effective."
Agustín Griguol
Technical Lead, Full Stack Engineer — reported to Rob

Mercurious.ai is a new practice. Client results are being built — and will be shared here as they come in. In the meantime, get in touch and let's start writing yours.

Book your Orientation

Get in Touch

Let's make AI specific to you.

Have a question? Something specific to your business you'd like to run by me first? Drop me a message below. I read every one and reply personally.

You'll also be added to a small list of Irish professional services leaders thinking seriously about AI — honest insights, no noise, and easy to leave any time.

I read and reply to every message personally
No obligation to proceed — ever
An honest "not yet" saves you more than a bad yes
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