Applications with AI inside them, doing jobs you can name.

It's scoped like any other build. What the application has to do, what data it works from, and where people check the output. After a strategy call you get a written scope, and the AI features sit in it as line items. There's no premium multiplied across the project because the word AI is in the title.

Yours. The application calls the model provider through an account created in your name, and the API keys sit in your secrets vault next to your database, hosting, and code. We're administrators you can remove. Nothing about the AI features routes through an account of ours.

Not under the terms we build on. The major providers offer commercial API terms where your data is not used for training, and we set the account options to match. Your documents stay in your storage. The model gets called with what the task needs, under your account, so the terms that govern it are the ones on your contract with the provider.

It will, sometimes. The design assumes that from the first screen. Anywhere an error would cost money or trust, a person confirms before anything is committed. Extracted totals get checked against the document. Drafts are sent by a human. An assistant cites the record it pulled, so you can check the answer yourself. And when the model isn't sure, the item goes to a person. It doesn't guess quietly and hope.

We pick the model that fits the task and the budget at build time, and the model call gets built as a replaceable part behind one interface. Models keep improving. When a better or cheaper one shows up, swapping it in is a small change you can test. It isn't a rebuild. The prompts, the data handling, and the review steps all stay yours through it.

Whenever the rule is already known and someone can write it down. If your business logic is "apply this discount above that volume", that's arithmetic, and a language model is a slower and more expensive way to do arithmetic, and a less reliable one. AI earns its place on the genuinely fuzzy work. Reading a document laid out differently every time, sorting free text into categories, drafting something a person will edit. Putting a model in front of a deterministic rule is the most common waste we get asked to build, and we'll talk you out of it.

That comes down to where you let it act without a person, and you decide that during design. An extraction error a clerk confirms before posting costs a few seconds. The same error committed straight to the ledger costs a reconciliation and some trust. So we place the review step by consequence. Anything touching money, a customer commitment, or a compliance record waits for a human to confirm it. Anything reversible and low-stakes doesn't.

The provider meters model usage and bills it to your own account, so it behaves like hosting on your books, and there's no license in the middle. It's your account, so you see exactly what each feature consumes and you can cap it. That shapes the design. We keep the model out of paths that run constantly and put it where it replaces real human minutes. A feature that calls a model on every page load is usually a design mistake as much as a cost problem.

Only when a chat interface is genuinely the best shape for the job, and that's rarer than the industry suggests. An assistant that answers questions over your own records with the source attached earns its place, because the alternative is somebody searching three systems for twenty minutes. A chatbot bolted to a website to answer questions a page answers better is a demo. If a request can't name the operational number it moves, we'll say so on the call and we won't build it.

Yes. Your documents stay in your storage, in your account, and the model only gets what the task needs. That's a constraint we set at the start of design, and it isn't a setting somebody toggles later. What gets sent, what stays local, and what is retained all go into the scope in writing. When the work is sensitive enough, ordinary code or a model you run yourself handles some tasks better, and we'll tell you when that trade is worth the extra complexity.