Why we built 174 Solutions

Two thirds of the AI tools market sells in two shapes. There’s the $19-a-month productivity layer — Copilot, ChatGPT Plus, the AI features inside Notion and Slack — sold to individuals or small teams who self-onboard. And there’s the eight-figure transformation engagement — McKinsey, Accenture, the Big Four — sold to the Fortune 500 as part of a 24-month program with a charter, a steering committee, and a plenary off-site.

Between those two extremes is the mid-market: organizations with 100 to 1,000 employees, an L&D budget that is real but not infinite, leadership that takes AI seriously but doesn’t have a Chief AI Officer, and a workforce that needs to actually become more capable, not just gain access to a new SaaS bill.

This is the gap 174 exists to fill.

What the existing options actually offer

The $19/seat productivity tools are useful and we recommend them. They are not, by themselves, a literacy program. They give the team access. They don’t teach anyone what good looks like. They don’t produce a baseline you can show a CHRO. They don’t generate a written policy. They don’t help a manager decide which use cases are worth spending the team’s time on. The vendors that sell them know this — that’s not what they’re for.

The transformation engagements are also useful, when the engagement size matches the company size. For a Fortune 500, the eight-figure number buys a year of dedicated consultants, a custom curriculum, executive coaching, and a change management program. For a 400-person company, the same purchase is impossible, would feel out of proportion to the rest of the L&D budget, and would create internal resentment toward AI before the program even started.

What the mid-market actually needs sits cleanly between those two: a credible program with a published methodology, real curriculum, real measurement, and a real human partner — at a price that fits inside a normal L&D line item. Per-seat economics that scale from a single pilot to the full org. No annual commitment to begin. No procurement marathon to start.

What’s been missing

The reason this gap exists isn’t that the mid-market hasn’t asked. It’s that the unit economics of the existing models don’t fit.

A $5M consulting engagement won’t profitably serve a customer who only needs $200,000 of work. A $19/seat tool won’t profitably staff a human enablement partner. Most attempts to bridge the two end up either over-promising on the consulting side (“we’ll bring our enterprise methodology to mid-market!”) and under-delivering, or over-promising on the tooling side (“our learning platform will train your team!”) and not actually moving capability.

We’ve watched this for two years. The pattern that consistently works is something more boring than any of those: a small, focused team that combines a real curriculum with a real assessment with a real human who shows up monthly, sized for mid-market budgets and operationalized for mid-market pace. That’s the shape we’re building toward.

What 174 is building

Three things, deliberately bounded:

A platform. Self-paced curriculum, an organizational assessment, and dashboards your CFO will read. The platform stands on its own at $99 per seat per month. A team can buy access for one seat and use it productively the same day.

Concierge enablement. A dedicated partner who runs the rollout with your L&D team — kickoff workshop, manager training, monthly reviews, custom curriculum tuning, exec-readable progress reports. $199 per seat per month. The same platform underneath, with a human alongside.

An assessment. Free, ten minutes, public methodology, leadership-shareable report. The assessment is the front door. The output is useful enough that a buyer can use it to justify a pilot internally, even if they never engage 174 beyond the assessment itself. We put real care into making this artifact stand alone — because the buyers we want are the ones who would.

That’s the entire offering. There is no enterprise tier. There is no managed services package on top. There is no marketplace. We are deliberately under-shipping product surface area in favor of getting one rollout shape — Assess, Pilot, Expand, Operate — to land reliably for mid-market customers.

What the buyer signal looks like

The customer profile that maps cleanly onto 174 has four properties:

1. Headcount between 100 and 1,000. Below 100, the SMB tools are usually enough; above 1,000, the program shape needs more than two service tiers can fit.
2. An identified program owner. Almost always L&D, People Ops, or a Chief of Staff. Sometimes a Head of AI Enablement. Always a human who can run a 4-week pilot without needing to ask permission first.
3. A leadership team that has stopped asking whether AI matters and started asking what to do. The buyers we close fast are the ones whose CHRO has been asked the question by the board.
4. No existing internal program of meaningful scale. If a company already has a year-long internal AI literacy program with a dedicated team, we’re typically helping at the margins, not running the program.

If that profile sounds like your company, the assessment is the right place to begin. We’ll meet you there. If it doesn’t quite fit — too small, too large, too far along — tell us what you actually need and we’ll point you at the right thing, even when the right thing isn’t us.