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.
The engineering story behind our own helpdesk agent: why a generic chatbot could not do the job, how code and documentation are indexed so retrieval is grounded in the actual build, and the decisions that made it safe to put in front of customers.
Retrieval-augmented generation answers from passages that look like the question. GraphRAG adds the relationships between things. Which one a knowledge assistant needs depends on the questions people actually ask.
Off-the-shelf AI products force your business into their shape. A framework is a proven architecture with the hard parts solved, tailored to your systems in weeks. Here is the difference, and when each is right.