The phrase covers everything from offshore app shops to research labs. What an AI development company should actually do for a mid-market business, when you need one rather than a product, and how to tell a good one from a demo.
Code, evaluation sets, prompts, indexes, the data the system learned from: each is owned by someone, and the answer differs between a product, a platform and a build. What to ask so the system you pay for is yours.
Day rates reward time; fixed prices reward outcomes, provided the scope is real. Which to use for consultancy, for a build and for the running of a system, and the one condition that makes a fixed price safe for both sides.
The deliverable at the end of discovery is a document, so here is what a good one contains, section by section, and the questions to ask of a consultancy's sample before you commission one.
A consultant tells you where AI creates value. An implementation partner builds it. Most businesses need both, in that order, and the mistakes come from hiring one to do the other's job.
The word is on every pricing page and it means different things on each. The five things an enterprise AI tier should give you, and how to tell which ones a given tier actually does.
The contractual commitment that your data is not used to train the model is what makes enterprise AI tools safe to open. What the commitment actually covers, where it does not apply, and the six things to confirm at contracting.
For every AI use case there are four honest answers, and the right one depends on whose knowledge it runs on, whether the workflow is standard, and whether the market will solve it first. A framework that fits on one page.
The questions that separate a consultancy that will deliver from one that will present. We answer each of them for ourselves, so you can compare.
The three enterprise assistants differ in where they live, how they handle documents and code, their data terms and their cost. How to choose on your own evidence rather than on a vendor's demo, and why many businesses run two.
How UK AI consultancy is priced, what the common engagements actually contain, and how to read a quote so you compare scope rather than rates.