Nine-Dots is Michael and Ethan Jablon. When you work with us, you work with us — not with whoever is available on our staffing bench this quarter.
Michael brings executive-level technology leadership from a senior role at a top-100 company. He leads client strategy, business development, and engagement scoping — the part of consulting that requires real organizational credibility and hard-won judgment about how large enterprises actually make technology decisions.
He leads executive-level communication, stakeholder relationships, and the strategic framing that turns technical analysis into decisions. The combination of enterprise background and hands-on AI engagement is rare at the boutique level, and it's central to how Nine-Dots operates.
LinkedIn ↗Ethan executes the hands-on work: requirements gathering, agentic AI system design, data quality assessment, web architecture, and analytical deliverables. He's the practitioner who turns strategy into something that actually ships.
His background spans Claude and LLM system design, data pipelining, stakeholder discovery, and structured requirements documentation — built project by project across nonprofit, PE, and technology engagements. He's why the strategy Nine-Dots recommends is always grounded in what's actually buildable.
LinkedIn ↗The honest answer is: not much about what we do is novel. Good advisory work is good advisory work. What's different is who does it, and how.
There is no associate tier at Nine-Dots. The people who do the work are the same people who scope it and communicate the results. This isn't a staffing model where senior people appear at kickoff and closeout while juniors handle everything in between.
When you email us, you hear back from Michael or Ethan. When a question comes up mid-engagement, you call the person who's doing the work. There is no account manager between you and the people solving your problem.
We don't have formal partnerships with Databricks, Salesforce, Microsoft, or any other platform vendor. That means our recommendations are driven entirely by what fits your situation — not by referral fees or partner incentives.
Most advisory firms give you a strategy and hand you to a separate implementation team. The handoff is where the value leaks out. We keep both in the same hands — which means the strategy is grounded in what's actually buildable, and the implementation is grounded in the actual goal.
We'll tell you if Nine-Dots isn't the right firm for your situation. If you need a 200-person implementation team, or if your problem is primarily a change management challenge that doesn't require AI expertise, we'll tell you — and we'll point you in a direction that makes more sense.
When we design agentic AI systems, we build on Anthropic's Claude. That's a deliberate choice based on three years of hands-on experience across multiple platforms.
Claude is consistently the most capable model for the kind of reasoning, document processing, and multi-step agentic tasks that actually matter in business contexts. Anthropic's commitment to safety and reliability is also central to our ability to deploy AI in regulated environments where auditability and predictability are non-negotiable.
That said, we're not dogmatic. We evaluate OpenAI and other platforms for each engagement and recommend what fits. We've worked with Claude and GPT-4 on different workflows for the same client. The goal is always the right tool for the job.