AI development agency

An AI development agency built around shipping, not slide decks.

We design, build, and deploy production-grade AI products end-to-end. Small senior teams, weeks-to-production cadence, named artifacts at every milestone, and transparent partnership from first call to handover.

Working with mid-market product teams across the UK and US. AI-first delivery from week one, not retrofitted from a generalist consultancy.

What an AI development agency should actually do

Most teams need a partner who ships, not a programme that plans.

AI projects fail in predictable ways. The proof of concept works in a notebook and breaks under real traffic. The eval methodology gets written after launch instead of before. The team that built the prototype is not the team that runs it. The platform partner is happy. The CFO is not.

A focused AI development agency exists to short-circuit that pattern. One small senior team owns the work from discovery through deployment. Eval harness, monitoring, fallbacks, and the deployment runbook are part of the build, not a follow-on hardening project. The cadence is weeks, not quarters, because AI features compound their value the moment they ship.

That is the model we are built around. Not enterprise consulting. Not staff augmentation. Not a marketplace of vetted developers. A senior team that takes a problem and ships a working AI product against it, with the artifacts and accountability you need to run it in production after we hand it over.

What we build

AI capabilities we ship to production

Every project ships with the architecture, evaluation, and monitoring that production AI requires. These are the floor, not premium add-ons.

LLM applications

Conversational interfaces, copilots, structured-output systems, and document workflows. Built with prompt versioning, retrieval architecture, latency budgets, and cost ceilings from day one.

RAG and retrieval systems

Production-grade retrieval pipelines over your knowledge base. Chunking strategy, embedding selection, hybrid search, reranking, grounding evaluation, and refresh tooling.

AI agents and tool-use systems

Multi-step agents that call tools, query systems, and act on behalf of users. Bounded autonomy, audit trails, deterministic fallbacks, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints where they matter.

Workflow automation

AI-driven automation across operations, support, finance, and back-office tasks. Built to integrate with your existing systems, not to replace them.

Evaluation and monitoring

Custom eval harnesses tied to your business outcomes. Drift detection, regression alerts, and quality dashboards your team owns after we hand over.

Audit and hardening

AI features built by another team that need governance, eval coverage, security review, or production reliability. We pick up where the previous build stopped.

How we work

Four phases, weeks per phase, named artifacts at every gate

No multi-month discovery before building starts. Discovery is a sprint that produces a scoped build, then we build, then we ship, then we hand over. Each phase has explicit deliverables and an exit ramp.

Phase 1
Discovery Sprint

One to two weeks. Use case framing, data and PII mapping, evaluation criteria, model and architecture selection, scoped delivery plan with named deliverables and timeline. You can stop here if the answer is no.

Phase 2
Build Sprint

Four to eight weeks. Working AI feature in your hands, eval harness tied to business metrics, monitoring and fallback paths, deployment runbook. Weekly demos, shared backlog, acceptance criteria written down before the work starts.

Phase 3
Ship and stabilise

One to two weeks. Production deployment, observability wiring, alert thresholds, runbook walk-through, and a measured baseline against the eval harness. Live before we leave.

Phase 4
Handover or retainer

Choose your exit. Full handover with documented architecture, eval methodology, and runbooks; or a lightweight retainer where we keep iterating and your team learns the patterns alongside us.

What you walk away with

Named artifacts, not a slide deck

Every engagement ends with the same set of artifacts your team can run in production after we hand over.

Production-deployed AI feature, with the integrations and access your team owns
Evaluation harness tied to business outcomes, runnable in CI on every change
Monitoring and alerting wired into your existing observability stack
Fallback and degradation behaviour that protects users when the model fails
Deployment runbook with rollout, rollback, and incident response procedures
Risk register covering data, model, and operational risks with mitigations
Architecture documentation, ADRs, and a clean handover walkthrough
Why work with us

Built for AI delivery, not adapted to it

AI is what we do. Every engagement is an AI build. The model is calibrated for that one job.

AI-first from day one

Not a generalist consultancy with an AI practice. Not a digital agency expanding into AI. Every project we take on is AI-led, which means evaluation, prompt and retrieval architecture, and production monitoring are part of how we work, not skills we have to recruit for.

Senior team, end-to-end

A small senior team owns design, engineering, and delivery together. No layered handoffs between strategists, designers, and engineers. No analyst-led discovery followed by a different team building.

Productized engagements with transparent scope

Discovery Sprint, Build Sprint, Automation Rollout, Audit and Hardening. Named deliverables, week-by-week cadence, exit ramps. Pricing is bespoke per project because every AI build is different, but the scope and shape are never opaque.

Vendor-neutral by design

No cloud partnership quotas. We choose the model, provider, and architecture that fit your product, not what satisfies a partner relationship. If a self-hosted open model is the right call, we do that. If a frontier API fits, we do that.

Related

Where to look next

Deeper detail on the engagements and approach behind this work.

FAQ

Common questions

What does an AI development agency actually do?

A focused AI development agency designs, builds, and deploys AI products end-to-end. The work spans discovery (problem framing, data and architecture decisions), build (model selection, prompt and retrieval architecture, integration), production (eval, monitoring, fallbacks, deployment runbook), and handover. Done well, the engagement ends with a working AI feature your team can run in production, not a slide deck about what to build.

How is this different from a digital agency that does AI?

Digital agencies typically built their model around web and mobile work and added AI as a service line. Their delivery cadence, team structure, and engagement size reflect that origin. An AI-first agency is calibrated for AI delivery from day one. Eval methodology, prompt and retrieval architecture, production monitoring, and AI risk patterns are part of how we work, not skills we had to recruit for.

What is the typical engagement length?

A Discovery Sprint runs one to two weeks. A Build Sprint runs four to eight weeks depending on complexity. An Automation Rollout runs four to twelve weeks. Audit and Hardening runs two to four weeks. Most engagements take a project from idea to production AI in eight to twelve weeks total.

Do you publish pricing?

No. Every AI project is bespoke and the scope drives the cost. Our packages publish week-by-week cadence, named deliverables, and exit ramps so you can compare scope and shape transparently before we quote. Pricing is set per project against the agreed scope.

Where do you work?

We work with mid-market product teams and forward-thinking businesses across the UK and US. Time zones, contract law, and regulatory realities (UK GDPR, EU AI Act, US sector rules) are part of how we deliver. We occasionally work with teams elsewhere when the project fits.

How do I know if my project is a fit?

Book a free 15-minute feasibility triage. We will tell you honestly whether your project benefits from AI-first delivery, whether the timing is right, and what scope makes sense. We turn down projects that are not AI-led because that is what we are built to do well.

Ready to ship an AI product, not a strategy document?

Book a free 15-minute feasibility triage. We will scope what shipping your AI feature actually looks like, give you an honest read on timing, and tell you if we are the wrong fit.

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