When nothing off the shelf fits
Sometimes the job really is specific to your business and no product does it. That is what bespoke AI development is for. It is also the most over-sold service in this market, so the first thing we do is check you need it.
Custom development earns its cost when the problem is genuinely yours: your terminology, your rules, your data, your edge cases. It is the wrong answer when a configured off-the-shelf tool would have done the job for a fraction of the money, and a supplier who never says that is not advising you.
Also sold as bespoke AI development, custom AI solutions, AI software development and machine learning development.
The work it takes
off your desk
Work that runs on your own vocabulary
Trades, sectors and professions have language that general tools get wrong. A model grounded in your own documents and your own terms does not.
Rules no product encodes
Pricing logic, eligibility, compliance checks. The things your most experienced person carries in their head and nobody has ever written down.
Joining data nothing else joins
When the answer only appears by combining two or three sources that no product connects, that combination is the thing worth building.
A capability inside your own product
If you sell software, AI features usually need to be built rather than bought, because they have to behave like the rest of your product.
No surprises,
in writing.
Scope and price agreed before anything is built. If we think you do not need this, we will tell you that instead.
Get a quote ↗- An honest recommendation first, including "you do not need this"
- A fixed-price pilot on one real case before any larger commitment
- The working system, integrated with where the job actually happens
- Evaluation against your own examples, so quality is measured not asserted
- Full ownership: the code, the configuration and the right to take it elsewhere
Where this
goes wrong
Every supplier will tell you what their service does. These are the ways it fails, and what we do about each one. If a supplier cannot tell you this, they have not built enough of them.
Building when configuring would do
The most expensive mistake in this field is a bespoke build that replaces something you could have bought. We check that first, and we have talked clients out of projects on this basis.
Training a model from scratch
Almost never necessary. Most useful business AI is an existing model grounded in your documents and your rules. Training from scratch is expensive and usually means somebody has misdiagnosed the problem.
No way to measure whether it is good
Without a set of your own examples and expected answers, "it seems better" is the only available verdict. We build that evaluation set before we build the thing.
A prototype presented as a product
A demo that works on prepared inputs is not a system. The gap between the two is error handling, monitoring, permissions and the boring parts, and it is most of the work.
What everyone
asks us
It depends on scope, and you will always know upfront. We normally start with a fixed-price pilot on a single job so you find out whether the value is real before committing further. The full build is quoted after that, in writing, before it starts.
Not necessarily. Many useful jobs work with the data you already have, however messy. If data genuinely needs tidying first, that is part of the work and we will be honest about it.
Yes. The code, the configuration and the design are yours. No lock-in.
A pilot on one job is usually a few weeks. Because we take the biggest opportunity first, the value tends to show up early rather than at the end.
Other AI services
Start with
one job.
Tell us the task that eats the most time. We will tell you honestly whether AI is the right answer for it, and what it would cost to find out.
Get a quotation