Expert Scale™ · For PEOs & Channel Partners

Something no competing PEO has.
You don’t have to build it, and it costs you nothing to offer.

Your clients' employees stop interrupting the HR administrator. Your salespeople get something no competing PEO has. And it costs you nothing to put in front of them.

Drew Harris CEO & Co-Founder info@expertscale.ai
Alan Kadish Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer info@expertscale.ai
$2–$5Typical cost per employee per month
6%Of questions need a human
<24 hrsFirst interview to live Protégé
$0Cost to you to offer it

Two revenue lines, and the first one is nearly free.

A Digital Protégé is a voice AI built from one specific person's knowledge. It answers questions in their judgment and framing, and — critically for anything HR-adjacent — it only knows what that person knows, so it cannot make things up.

For a PEO that turns into two distinct lines.

1. Your own Protégé

Built on your HRIS knowledge, your onboarding process, and the twenty questions your service team answers every week. Your clients get self-service that actually answers; your team gets those hours back. Small usage, and your salespeople have something live to demo.

2. A Protégé per client company

Each client's own culture, policies, handbook and SOPs, layered on top of the HR knowledge you already provide. Their employees ask it instead of interrupting their HR administrator — or yours.

You bill the usage

Under a reseller arrangement you set your own retail rate, bill your clients directly, and keep the spread. Your economics are yours to control, not a percentage we hand you.

"Low barrier of entry for the PEO, and it actually gives them a differentiator that helps their salespeople promote their own PEO better."

Priced in the unit you already work in.

Our pricing is usage-based — $40 per hour, billed by the minute, with volume discounts available at scale. There is no per-seat license, which is the part that matters: extending access to every employee at a client company costs nothing until somebody actually asks a question.

PEOs price per employee per month, so here is the translation. It has one convenient property:

Cost per employee per month does not depend on headcount. It depends only on how much each employee actually uses it — so the same number holds for a 40-person client and a 4,000-person client.

That means you can quote a band before you have modeled anyone's census:

Usage per employee, per monthWhat that looks like in practicePer employee / month
2 minutesA quarter of staff ask one question a month$1.33
4 minutesHalf of staff ask one question a month$2.67
6 minutesSteady HR self-service$4.00
8 minutesHR self-service plus active onboarding$5.33
12 minutesBroad adoption across both Protégés$8.00

At list rate, before any volume discount. $2 to $5 per employee per month is the realistic landing zone for HR self-service plus onboarding — which sits alongside your existing admin fee rather than competing with it.

Clients set their own usage thresholds and alerts, so nothing runs away from anybody.

In HR, a confident wrong answer is a liability.

This is why a general-purpose chatbot has no business answering a question about leave policy or classification. A Protégé is built the other way around, with four guardrails between a question and an answer.

Context before answer

The first two guardrails establish enough context about the question before anything is answered. Most AI is optimized to answer. This is optimized to understand first.

Your knowledge first

It goes to the validated knowledge base before anywhere else. If you have answered it, that is the answer the employee gets — in your framing, not a generic one.

Escalate, never guess

At the edge of what it knows it routes to a human instead of improvising. In practice about 6% of questions reach that point — and those 6% tell you exactly where your documentation is thin.

Built for the questions your clients' counsel will ask.

Your personal information is never used to train a public LLM. Personally identifiable information is stripped from uploaded documents by default, and nothing given to us is used to train a public model.

Knowledge can stay on your infrastructure. Where data sovereignty is a requirement, documentation can remain on-premise with Expert Scale connecting by secure API. When an agreement ends, the data stays inside the organization that owns it.

SOC 2 Type II certification is in progress, and the architecture was designed from the start for environments where a wrong answer carries real liability. The underlying approach is covered by a pending patent: 34 claims across 9 core innovations.

Two ways to work together.

Referral. You make an introduction, we contract with the client directly, and you earn a share of everything that account does with us — for the life of the account, not a one-time fee. Simple, no delivery burden, no billing.

Reseller. You contract with us, set your own retail rate, bill your clients, and keep the spread. More control, more margin, and the client relationship stays yours. This is the structure most PEOs will want, because it fits how you already sell.

Two-tier arrangements — where a partner you introduce goes on to refer their own clients — are also available. We have that running today. Terms are set per partner, so the honest answer is that it depends on what you are bringing and how much of the work you are doing; that is a conversation rather than a rate card.

What partners ask first.

What does this cost us to offer?
Nothing to make it available. Usage is billed to whoever is consuming it, so there is no shelf cost, no minimum commitment to carry, and no inventory risk. Your own Protégé is a small usage account that doubles as the demo your salespeople use.
Who gets access — the HR admin, our client contact, or every employee?
Your call, and because pricing is usage-based rather than per-seat that decision costs nothing on its own. Most start with the administrator and the client contact, prove the hours saved, then open it to employees.
How long before a client is live?
A working Protégé can be live in under 24 hours from a one-hour interview. From that hour alone it can answer about half of what the expert would; it deepens as you add documentation, and after a few months of real conversations it handles about nine questions in ten.
We have looked at LMS platforms. How is this different?
An LMS needs content built before it is worth anything — video, animation, curriculum, months of work. This starts with an hour of somebody talking, then absorbs the documentation you already have. And employees ask it questions conversationally instead of searching a course catalog for an answer that may not be in there.
What if it gives one of our clients bad HR guidance?
It answers from the validated knowledge base rather than improvising, and escalates to a human at the edge of what it knows — that is architecture, not a setting. Every conversation is logged and summarized, so you can see exactly what was said and where the gaps are.
How do we get paid?
Under a referral arrangement, on the revenue of accounts you source, for the life of the account. Under a reseller arrangement, you bill your clients directly and keep your margin. Either way it is recurring and it grows with usage rather than paying out once.

Hear one before you put your name on it.

You would be introducing this to your clients, so the thing worth testing is not whether it sounds impressive — it is what it does at the edge of what it knows. That is the behavior your clients would be exposed to.

Talk to Ray's Protégé

Said plainly: Ray is a composite senior manufacturing engineer, not an HR professional. If you place people into machine shops some of it will land; if your book is professional services, it will not. It is the Protégé we have built, and we would rather name the mismatch than let you find it.

The behavior is what transfers. Watch it refuse, watch it escalate rather than improvise, watch it credit Ray by name. Ask it something an HR generalist would know and a machinist would not. What it does with that question is what a client of yours would get.

Uses your microphone · about two minutes · no signup, no email

Start a partner conversation.

It takes about two minutes. Answer for your own firm, or for the one client company you would want to try this on first — either is a useful place to start.

Hear one first

We will reply personally within one business day. No sequence, no drip, no demo request — if it is not a fit we will tell you that instead, and say why.

Start a partner conversation.
Bring one client company you think would use it and we will model the numbers against their headcount. If you would rather prove it on one account first, our 30-Day Continuity Proof is a fixed $1,997 with a measured result at the end — a small, defensible thing to put in front of a client before you put your name on it.