AI consulting
for people who still own the work.
Lemonwater LLC is an AI and technology consultancy based in Ipswich, Massachusetts. We advise entrepreneurs and micro-businesses on where AI actually earns its place — and where it is a subscription that quietly takes your leverage, your data, or your judgment instead.
Most AI advice comes from someone with a platform to sell, a certification to justify, or a headline to chase. The tools themselves rarely perform the way their demos describe. Almost nobody explains the tradeoff under the convenience: what data leaves your business, what dependency gets built in by design.
We came to this the other way around — testing tools ourselves, getting suspicious of the ones that could not explain their own reasoning, and building our own where the market option asked for more trust than it had earned. That is still how we advise: as a practitioner, not a reseller. No platform to sell you. No token usage to pad.
We are not here to make you dependent on AI. We are here to make you fluent in it.
Premix is a tool.
Lemonwater is the consultancy.
When a workflow that matters to your margin should be a tool you own, we build it — instead of renting a subscription forever. Premix is one of those tools: production-sound prep for location mixers and documentary filmmakers. It lives at lemonwater.io/premix. It is not the company, and it is not a requirement of a consulting engagement.
New light, and new shadows.
I heard about generative AI early, from the filmmaking side — editors and mixers reaching for it before most consultants had an opinion on it. What stood out wasn’t the disruption headlines. It was how rarely the tools performed the way their demos promised.
The moral and ethical objections to AI are worth taking seriously. Like any tool, the outcome depends on how it’s used. I tried a long list of AI products in my own work, and the actual performance was rarely how the potential was described. That got expensive in time, and it made me suspicious of how little most of these tools could explain about their own reasoning.
So I went and got technically informed instead of waiting for the industry to explain itself. Big tech has no incentive to make this legible to the people using it. Someone outside that room should be able to say plainly what a tool does and doesn’t do — a watchdog, not a reseller.
I still think everyone running a small business should get literate in this, on their own terms — not on the terms of whoever is selling the leverage back to you a subscription at a time.
Here’s how that lands, concretely: bigger work with smaller crews, repetitive tasks off your plate, workflows you can actually redesign instead of just enduring. The consulting question is the unglamorous one — where a tool earns its place in your business, and where it’s a subscription that’s quietly using you.
That’s where I am now: advising as a practitioner, building the tools myself where the market option asked for more trust than it had earned. Premix is one of those tools. Lemonwater is the consultancy.
AI can help a smaller shop compete without making that shop dependent on whoever built the model. It is possible without handing over all your data. That’s the version of this I’m interested in — happy to talk about what it looks like for your business.
Longer writing lives in Lemonwater Observer: sustainability, responsible use, knowledge databases, and how to tailor a model to a business without building a profile of the people in it.
Who you are talking to.
Kelly Gallanar founded Lemonwater LLC in 2018. The consulting practice comes from using the tools, distrusting the ones that would not explain themselves, and refusing to sell a platform. Software we ship is optional. Judgment is not.