Why a studio, not a consultancy.
There are five ways to get AI into your operation. Four routinely end in a slide deck, a stalled pilot, or a tool nobody trusts. Here's the honest comparison — and where we don't fit.
Four of these stall. One ships.
The deck
The pitch: brand-name credibility, a big team, a polished roadmap.
The catch: $1M+ and 6–12 months for a strategy and a pilot you still have to operationalize. The senior who pitched is gone by week two.
The hiring problem
The pitch: full control, IP stays in-house.
The catch: 6–9 months to hire an ML team that's never shipped a production agent in your domain, plus the eval/governance discipline they'll learn on your dime.
The square peg
The pitch: fast, cheap, plug-and-play.
The catch: a horizontal tool that doesn't know your payer rules, your forms, or your edge cases. It demos well and dies in production at 70% accuracy.
The prototype trap
The pitch: a Zapier flow or a contractor for a few thousand a month.
The catch: no evaluation framework, no drift monitoring, no audit trail. Fine for a demo; uninsurable for a regulated workflow.
One named workflow, taken end-to-end to production in 12 weeks at a fixed $24,000–$95,000 depending on organization size — against the $1M+ and 6–12 months above. Eval framework, drift monitoring, audit trail, and a defined ROI target included. The operator who designs it is the operator who ships it. Vertical-deep (healthcare first), outcome-priced, and willing to share the risk.
- vs the consultancy: we end in a production agent earning revenue, not a slide. A smaller scope, a shorter timeline.
- vs in-house: we've already shipped the agents and the discipline — you skip the 6-month hiring and learning curve.
- vs the generic vendor: we go vertical-deep into your workflow and its edge cases, then prove quality with evals before cutover.
- vs DIY: production-grade governance from day one — the difference between the 12% who reach production and the 88% who don't.
We're not for you if…
We'd rather lose the deal than take a bad-fit engagement. If these sound like you, a different option above will serve you better — and we'll say so in the reply.
- You want plug-and-play SaaS. We build bespoke agents around your workflow; if an off-the-shelf tool fits, buy it.
- Your workflow isn't documented and nobody owns it. We need a real process and an internal owner to instrument against.
- You can't put a number on the outcome. Our model is outcome-priced; if the metric is unknowable, we're the wrong partner.
- You want a human fully out of the loop on day one. In regulated work, we ship with human-in-the-loop and earn autonomy over time.
- You need full production next week. Production-grade takes 8–12 weeks end-to-end. We put your agent live alongside your team inside 30 days — the remaining weeks are evals, hardening, and integration, the part pretenders skip.
If you want the agent in production, we should talk.
Send us the workflow. We'll tell you honestly which of the five paths fits — even when the answer isn't us.
Related reading: every enterprise software company is becoming an AI company — a buyer’s five-question test for telling working AI from agent-washing.