Four movements from signal to system.
Every engagement runs on the same four-phase rhythm. It is how we turn an ambiguous AI brief into a deployed engine your team owns, observes, and improves — with effort budgets and deliverables written down before we start.
02 · ARCHITECT
03 · BUILD
04 · ACTIVATE
- Duration
- 2 weeks
- Deliverable
- Opportunity map, ROI model
AI Potential Audit.
Two-week forensic of data, workflows and operational friction. We map where ML earns its keep and where it doesn't.
We start with your reality, not a slide template. In two weeks we interview operators, inspect data, shadow workflows, and pressure-test where AI can change the economics of the work — and where it would just be theatre.
The output is a written opportunity map: ranked use cases with effort, risk, expected ROI, and a clear list of the ones we recommend not building.
- Duration
- 3-4 weeks
- Deliverable
- Reference architecture
Architectural Blueprint.
Domain-specific system design. Data pipelines, model selection, guardrails, and integration contracts — engineered, not prompt-hacked.
Once we know what to build, we design how. This is where the engineering discipline earns its keep: pipelines, model choices, evaluation strategy, guardrails, integration contracts, observability.
You get a reference architecture your team can defend in front of security, legal, and the board — not a notebook that happened to work once.
- Duration
- 6-10 weeks
- Deliverable
- Production engine v1
Engine Build.
Proprietary engine build with your team embedded. Evaluation harnesses, continuous QA, and the guardrails your legal and ops teams need.
We build. Your engineers embed with ours. We ship iteratively against evals you can read — not vibes — and the production engine is in your repo and your infrastructure from day one.
By the end of this phase, you have a working system, a QA harness, and a team that understands it.
- Duration
- Ongoing
- Deliverable
- Live system + playbook
Activation & Handoff.
Deployment, observability, and knowledge transfer. Your team owns the engine — we stay on as fractional CTOs for as long as you need us.
Going live is the start, not the finish. We deploy, instrument, tune, and write the runbooks. Your team owns the engine; we stay on as fractional CTO for ongoing strategic oversight for as long as it's useful.
When we leave — and we do leave — you should not miss us.