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A focused, founder-led AI implementation practice — built on one engineering principle: a system you cannot operate is a system you do not own.
Catalyst Consulting designs, builds, and ships AI and automation systems for small and mid-sized businesses — and then hands them over completely. We work in fixed-scope, fixed-price engagements with a defined end. We are not a staffing agency and not a monthly retainer. We are the team you bring in to build the thing, train your people, and move your business forward.
It is a deliberately focused practice — built by an engineer, not a marketing department. That focus is the point: the person who scopes your engagement is the person who builds it and the person you call when you have a question.
Gabe Upton
Founder & principal engineer
Catalyst Consulting is led by Gabe Upton, a chemical and process engineer. Process engineering is a discipline of rigor, failure analysis, and systems that have to hold up under real-world load — and that is the lens he points at business operations: not “what AI demo looks impressive,” but “what process is failing, and how do we engineer it so it does not.”
Consulting Engineer · Bryan Research & Engineering
2022 – 2024
The firm behind ProMax, a process-simulation platform used by engineers worldwide. Simulated complex industrial systems, troubleshot customer models — and trained hundreds of engineers to operate the platform themselves.
Project Engineer · PEI Consulting Group
2024 – 2025
Consulting in the truest sense: led regulatory permit applications, coordinated directly with clients and agencies, and built automation tools that streamlined calculations, tracking, and reporting.
Process Engineer · energy sector
2025 – present
Builds AI-driven systems that integrate real-time data, optimize operations, and automate regulatory document generation — bridging engineering, compliance, and data.
Three threads run through that résumé: a process engineer's discipline; a standing habit of building automation to kill repetitive work; and — at the firm behind a globally used simulation platform — training hundreds of engineers to operate complex systems themselves. That last one matters most here. Handing over a system so other people can run it without you is not a promise on this site. It is something the founder has already done, at scale. Catalyst Consulting points all three threads at small and mid-sized businesses.
“I kept watching businesses pay, month after month, for systems they did not understand and could not touch. The dependency was the product. I wanted to build the opposite — and then prove it by walking away.”
Outside the practice, Gabe builds and maintains The Catalyst Project — a free, AI-powered platform — at his own expense. The engineering behind it is public, and open to inspect.
Catalyst Consulting is a deliberately focused, founder-led practice. That is why engagements are taken in a small cohort rather than at volume — the person who scopes your build is the person who builds it and the person you call.
The AI consulting market is quietly optimized against the client. The most profitable engagement is the one that never ends — a black-box system, a standing retainer, tools the client cannot touch. Dependence is not a side effect of that model. It is the product.
Catalyst Consulting runs on the opposite premise. Every engagement is engineered to end with you owning, operating, and able to extend your own systems. We call it sovereignty, and it is not a tagline — it is the literal scope of work. The documentation, the training, the credentials, the clean handoff are line items, not favors.
The standard AI consulting model, line by line — against ours.
We build for small and mid-sized businesses across every industry. If your business runs on repeatable processes — and every business does — there is work here worth doing. The workflows differ by trade; the model — build, train, hand off — does not. Name the bottleneck, and we can scope the build.
A system without documentation is a system you rent. We write it for the operator, not the engineer.
If you cannot leave, the price only goes up. We build so the exit is always cheap — including the exit from us.
The handoff is not a zip file. It is your team able to run, fix, and extend what we built.
Anything can be made to work once, on stage. We engineer for the day it has to work without us watching.
A business that owns its systems gets faster and cheaper to improve every year. That is the whole thesis.
A discovery call is free, runs 30 minutes, and ends with a clear read on what is worth building — whether or not you work with us.
Book a Discovery Call