How long does it take to actually ship one?

The useful answer is two to six weeks for a focused build, and twelve weeks to a hardened production agent. The more useful answer is what happens inside those weeks — because a vendor who cannot tell you that is guessing at the date.

What a realistic schedule looks like

Week one: scope and evaluation. Before anything gets built, the workflow gets named and an evaluation set gets assembled from your real historical cases with an agreed accuracy bar. This week feels slow and saves the project. Skipping it is the single most common reason AI builds fail.

Weeks two to three: the build. Retrieval over your material, the rules, the interface, the escalation path. Chat assistants are usually done here. Web and voice take a few days longer; mobile adds App Store review.

Week three or four: running alongside your team. The assistant handles real work in parallel with your people, who see everything it produces before anything goes out. This is where the edge cases surface — always, without exception — and it is why the phase exists.

Beyond that: production and tuning. For a bigger agent engagement this continues to week twelve with monitoring, drift alarms and audit trails hardened before full cutover.

What actually causes delays

In our experience the delay is almost never the AI. It is access. Waiting for credentials to a system, waiting for a security review, waiting for someone to decide which of three conflicting policy documents is the current one. The build is predictable; the organisation around it is not.

You can compress that. Before kickoff, get one named decision-maker, get the credentials issued, and get agreement on which documents are authoritative. Teams that do this ship on the early end of every range.

How to hold a vendor to a date

Ask for a dated milestone where the system runs against live work with your team watching — not a demo date, a running-alongside date. A demo proves nothing; anybody can demo. A date where real work flows through it is a commitment that can be checked, and it is the one we put in writing at 21 days.