Service · AI engineering
AI agent engineering
Being designed. Not yet offered — register interest via Work with us.
At a glance
Status
We are designing this service line and are not taking engagements for it yet. The approach and deliverables on this page describe how we intend to run it and may change before it opens. If its status changes, the new status will be shown here and on the services index.
- Who it’s for
- Startups · Enterprise product and platform teams
- Practice
- AI engineering
- Topics
- AgentsAI engineering
- Solutions
- Startups
Contents
The problem
Agent demos are easy; agents that behave predictably on real inputs, stay within their permissions and can be debugged are not.
Approach
How we intend to run this work, step by step.
Step 1: Start from the workflow
Decide what should be deterministic code and where model judgement genuinely adds value. Many 'agents' are better as workflows.
Step 2: Constrain the agent
Minimal tool surface, typed tool inputs, least-privilege credentials, explicit stop conditions and human approval for irreversible actions.
Step 3: Evaluate before shipping
Task-level success, trajectory checks and cost/latency budgets measured on a representative test set.
Step 4: Operate it
Tracing, cost monitoring and a feedback loop from production failures back into the test set.
Deliverables
What an engagement is designed to produce. The final list is fixed in the written proposal.
- Architecture and tool/permission design
- Working agent with tests and evaluation suite
- Tracing and monitoring setup
- Runbook and handover documentation
What this is not
- Not yet offered. This page describes a planned service line, not a service you can book today.
- We recommend a simpler, non-agentic design when it meets the requirement.
- Not a fixed package. Scope, deliverables and acceptance criteria are agreed in writing for each engagement.
Related benchmarks
Public benchmarks relevant to this work, with our review of what each measures and how healthy it is. They are a reference point, not a substitute for evaluation on your own tasks.
- Terminal-BenchAgents & tool useWhether an agent can complete realistic, test-verified tasks in a sandboxed command-line environment.Active
- τ-benchAgents & tool useWhether a tool-using agent completes customer-service tasks (retail, airline) while following domain policy in conversation with an LLM-simulated user.Flawed
Related research & insights
Paper breakdowns and guides on the topics this service draws on: Agents · AI engineering.
Explainer ·
What counts as an AI agent? A working definition for engineers
A definition you can check against code: a model, a set of tools, a loop, state carried between steps and an explicit stop condition — plus how to tell when a fixed workflow is the better engineering choice.
Analysis ·
How to read an AI benchmark table without fooling yourself
Eight questions to ask before you trust a row on a leaderboard: who ran it, which version, under what settings, whether the benchmark still separates models, whether the model has seen it, what the grader checks, how big the noise is, and which harness produced it.
Paper breakdown ·
ReAct: interleaving reasoning and actions in language models
A technical reading of the 2022 paper that had language models alternate between written reasoning and tool actions — how the thought–action–observation loop works, what it improved on question answering and interactive tasks, and where it failed.
Guide ·
A practical checklist for shipping a RAG system
What to have in place before a retrieval-augmented generation system meets real users: a retrieval evaluation set, structure-aware chunking, hybrid search, verifiable citations, permission-aware retrieval, a freshness plan and production monitoring.
Questions
Can we engage you for this now?
Not yet. This service line is planned: we are designing it and are not taking engagements for it. You can still register interest and describe what you need — it creates no obligation on either side.
Do you publish prices or timelines?
No. Scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria and any timing are agreed in a written proposal before work starts. We do not publish delivery service levels we have not committed to.
Can we share confidential material in an enquiry?
Please don’t. Describe the problem in general terms; no confidentiality obligation arises until an NDA is signed.