No vendor talking points and no thought-leadership filler. Practical writing on the technical decisions we have spent our careers making — including the ones we got wrong first.
Before any model is built, an AI project needs a few hundred real examples with agreed correct answers. The number matters, the sampling matters more, and writing the answers turns out to be writing the specification.
Read the article
Extraction is priced in fractions of a cent per page, so automating documents looks like an easy win. The money goes on everything after the page is read, and sometimes the right answer is not to build it.
MTD for Income Tax turned one annual deadline into five. The quarterly update itself is the easy part to automate. The records behind it and the return at the end are not.
“It needs to work offline” is usually scoped as a storage problem, and storage is the part a library already solves. What breaks sits at the boundary where the queue meets the server.
“No API” rarely means no way in. It means no documented one. What matters is how far from the screen you can get, and whether you are reading from the system or writing to it.
Whether the model trains on your data is the question everyone asks, and for business API use it was settled years ago. The exposure is in the copies nobody drew on the diagram.
The formulas are the easy part. What you are actually replacing is a specification that exists in one person’s head, and the projects that fail are the ones that never went looking for it.
The demo is the easy part. The gap between a convincing prototype and a system the business can rely on is made of evaluation, guardrails and ownership — and almost nobody budgets for it.
Buy when the process is standard, build when the process is the advantage. The difficulty is being honest about which one you are actually looking at.
Code quality is the least interesting thing in a technical due diligence. The risks that change a valuation are almost always operational.
If you are working through a technical choice and want an outside view, get in touch. A straight answer costs you nothing and does not commit you to anything.
We reply to every enquiry within one working day.
