The offer · 14 days
Two weeks inside the practice.
No installation, no procurement, no platform commitment. Fourteen days of access to the process that hurts, and a written answer at the end of it. You receive a brief, a runtime recommendation, a risk register and a price — or a plain statement that this is not the right fit.
The timeline
What happens, day by day.
- Week one
Days 1–7
Mapping the material, the people and the obligation.
- Days 1–2
Scope and access
We agree what hurts, what must not leave the building, and who owns the decision. Access is read-only where possible. Sample files are listed by name before anyone opens them.
- Days 3–4
Interviews
Structured conversations with the people who run the process: what they read, what they write, what they re-read, and where the handoffs fail. We are looking for document types and failure modes, not org-chart politics.
- Days 5–7
Corpus survey
Volume, format, sensitivity classification and where the index would sit. We identify what is structured enough to retrieve and what must remain human-only. No indexing runs without explicit approval.
- Days 1–2
- Week two
Days 8–14
A prototype on real material, and the written answer.
- Days 8–10
Prototype on real material
A narrow slice of the corpus, indexed in place, with a base model and a retrieval pipeline. You ask the questions your team actually asks. We measure latency, citation accuracy and where the model should refuse.
- Days 11–12
Runtime recommendation
Hardware or tenant sizing, model and quantisation choice, and the adaptation path if a house adapter is warranted. We name what you already own that can carry it and what you would need to procure.
- Days 13–14
Risk register and pricing
Risks we found, in plain language — operational, regulatory and technical. Fixed price to install, fixed price to run, and what ongoing support looks like. Delivered as a document you can circulate internally without us in the room.
- Days 8–10
Day 14
What you receive.
Five deliverables, written down. Not a slide deck. Not a demo that evaporates when we leave.
- 01Where the material actually livesMapped
- 02What must remain a human signatureListed
- 03The runtime, and where it sitsNamed
- 04Risks we found, in plain languageWritten
- 05Price to install, price to keep runningQuoted
Data handling
Sample files are listed, time-boxed, and destroyed.
If we need a sample file to write an honest brief, you approve it by name before it moves. It is used only for the diagnostic, stored only inside the boundary we agree, and destroyed on the last day.
The destruction is recorded: what was destroyed, when, and by whom. You receive a copy of that record. We do not retain copies, backups or embeddings derived from sample material beyond the engagement unless you ask us to install a system that keeps them.
After day 14
Install, or do not. Nothing is installed until you say so.
The diagnostic stands on its own. You can take the brief to your board, your IT team, or another vendor. There is no auto-renewal, no implied commitment, and no software left running when we leave unless you have signed for installation.
If you proceed, installation is a separate statement of work with the same boundary rules: your hardware or tenant, your keys, your logs. Handover includes a runbook and a training session for whoever holds the pager.
Who should not engage
If your data can safely go to a hosted API, you probably do not need us.
Sovereign deployment carries operational cost. It is justified when obligation, privilege, confidentiality or residency rules out a shared tenancy — or when the corpus is simply too sensitive to transmit, whatever the vendor's terms say.
If your material can transit to a hosted model under a data-processing agreement you have actually read, and your regulators and clients are satisfied, a local stack is engineering you pay for without receiving a control you need. We will tell you that in week one if it is true.
Start
Tell us what the next painful week looks like.
A briefing is a conversation, not a pitch. Bring the process that costs you your evenings, and we will tell you plainly whether this helps — and if it does not, what would.