Any AI consulting firm worth its fee asks one question before quoting: what does this replace? When the answer is somebody reading documents and retyping what they find into another system, the case is clear and the saving is countable.
We build four things from an Irish registered company, with EU data residency settled before anything is deployed.
What an AI Consulting Firm Should Build for You
Retrieval over your own documents. A model that has read your contracts, policies or case history and answers with a citation back to the source paragraph. Chunking and retrieval quality decide whether it works.
Agents that call your systems. Look up an order, raise a ticket, draft a reply. The value sits in the tools, and the question worth arguing about is which actions need a human to approve them.
EU deployment and on-premise models. For text that stays inside the Union or inside the building. Three components typically touch your data, and all three are checked against the residency requirement before a line is written.
Evaluation and testing. Real questions with agreed correct answers, scored before and after every change, and documented well enough to show an auditor.
Where the problem is a table of numbers rather than documents, it is machine learning instead.
Residency Decided Before the Build
AI for companies operating under EU rules starts with a map of where text travels. Model endpoint, vector store and logs each get a named region, agreed at scoping and written into the architecture note.
That record is also the evidence base the EU AI Act rewards. Keeping it from day one costs an afternoon, and it is the document your compliance advisers will ask for.
Evaluation Is the Contract
Twenty real questions with agreed answers tell you in an afternoon what a demonstration takes six weeks to show. We write that set during scoping with the people who will use the system.
Every later change is scored against it, so progress is a number your board can read. That measurement is what separates us from ai consulting companies selling on demonstration alone.
What It Costs
A retrieval system over an existing document set, with a real evaluation suite, is typically three to six weeks. Agent work scales with how many systems it touches and how well they are documented.
Running cost gets sized at the same time. A hosted API behind a busy internal tool can exceed the build cost across a year, so our ai development service shows that arithmetic up front, including the picture at ten times the opening volume.
How Engagements Start
Paid scoping first, producing the evaluation set and a written view of what the system is worth building. You own the code, the prompts and the evaluation data from the first commit.
Work then runs fixed price against a defined deliverable, or at a day rate. Book a scoping day and name the document pile costing the most time. An AI consulting firm earns the second project by making the first one measurable.
Related Services
Where the data sits across three systems, start with data and BI. Where it must run inside your own network, that is infrastructure. Where you want documents produced rather than questions answered, that is document automation.