The practice
Everything it takes to put AI to work.
Our services cover the full distance from a first conversation with an operator to a system the business relies on. No two engagements are assembled the same way. Each is composed from the capabilities below, in whatever combination the problem demands.
Forward deployed teams
Small, senior engineering teams placed inside your organisation, working on your systems, in your rooms, against your hardest operational problem. They report into your leadership and ship into your production environment.
- Embedded pods
- On-site
- Your stack
Applied AI systems
Agents, retrieval, decision support and automation designed around a real workflow and carried all the way to production: instrumented, monitored, and owned by someone with a name.
- Agentic systems
- Retrieval
- Decision support
Model adaptation and evaluation
Choosing, adapting and testing models for the job at hand. We build the evaluation harness first, so every later decision about models, prompts and vendors is made on evidence rather than on demos.
- Fine-tuning
- Evals
- Red-teaming
Data and platform foundations
The unglamorous layer that decides whether anything above it works: pipelines, entity models, permissions, lineage, and integration with the legacy systems the business actually runs on.
- Pipelines
- Ontology
- Legacy integration
Private and sovereign deployment
For organisations whose data cannot leave the building. We deploy inside your cloud tenancy, your data centre, or fully air-gapped environments, under your security and compliance regime.
- On-premises
- Air-gapped
- Regulated environments
Operational redesign
Most of the value in AI comes from changing how the work is done, which is an organisational problem before it is a software one. We redesign the workflow with the people who run it, then build the system that supports it.
- Workflow design
- Change with operators
- Adoption
Executive technical counsel
Direct, unhedged advice for chief executives and boards: build or buy, vendor and acquisition diligence, architecture review, and an honest reading of what the technology can and cannot do this year.
- Board and CEO
- Diligence
- Build or buy
Capability transfer
We are successful when you no longer need us. Every engagement includes documentation, pairing with your engineers, help hiring the permanent team, and a planned handover.
- Pairing
- Hiring support
- Handover
Ways of engaging
Three shapes an engagement can take.
Sprint
A short, intensive diagnostic. A small team spends a few weeks inside one problem and leaves you with a working prototype on your own data, an honest assessment, and a plan you could execute without us.
- Suited to
- A question that needs a real answer before capital is committed.
Embed
A full forward deployment. A dedicated team joins your organisation for one or more quarters and owns an outcome end to end, from first interview with an operator to a system running in production.
- Suited to
- A critical operation that has to change, and a leadership team ready to change it.
Residency
A standing relationship. A long-running team that moves between priorities as they emerge, combined with ongoing counsel to the executive team. Reserved for a very small number of clients.
- Suited to
- Companies for whom applied AI is a permanent strategic front.
Scope, team and commercial terms are set individually for every client. We are glad to work on fixed fees, retainers, or arrangements tied to outcomes where the outcome can be measured cleanly.
Enquiries
Bring us the problem you have not been able to hand to anyone else.
Describe it in a few paragraphs. If we think we can help, a principal of the firm will be in touch to arrange a conversation.
Request an engagement