Forward-deployed AI
We put AI inside the workflows that move your P&L: built on your data, shipped to your infrastructure, owned by your team. Quote automation, order entry, rebate recovery, live in the tools you already run. Working systems, not strategy decks.
What we believe
Every team has model access now. Few have working deployments. Turning one into the other is a craft: putting AI inside a real workflow, on your data, with your users and real accountability. That's where your returns live, and it's what we build for you.
Sandbox pilots that never ship don't count. The teams that win this decade will deploy AI inside the work itself. The gap between a pilot and a production system is wider than most operators realize.
A working system in production moves your numbers. We ship it on your infrastructure and measure ourselves against the operating outcomes you'd put on a board slide.
The team that diagnoses is the team that ships and the team that hands it off. You work with the same senior engineer from the first workshop to the final runbook.
Industry software works when your business looks like the ones it was built for. Established operators rarely do. Decades of process, legacy systems, and exceptions don't fold neatly into a template. What changed is the cost of the alternative. Bespoke software once meant a year and a heavy budget. With AI, a system built around how you actually work ships in weeks. Sometimes the best tool for your business is the one built for it.
Services
However you start, you get a fixed price up front, a target outcome you'd report to your board, and a system your team owns at the end.
2–3 weeks
We embed with your team, map the workflows, and find the two or three places AI pays back fastest. Then we ship one of them: a tightly scoped workflow, live in production, with the deployment plan and the ROI math for the rest.
8–14 weeks · fixed fee
We build the AI system inside your workflow, with your data, your tools, your people. We ship it to production on your infrastructure, train your team, and stay live through launch.
Ongoing retainer
For teams that want AI to keep compounding after the first system ships. We sit alongside you as fractional AI leadership: expanding deployments, measuring outcomes, and keeping the system honest as the underlying models evolve.
Industries
If your business runs on workflows, judgment, and documents, you have the most to gain. Here's where we see deployments land hardest.
Staffing, agencies, MSPs, field-service operators.
The economics come down to senior time per deliverable. Deployments cut the hours behind proposals, memos, call transcripts, and client onboarding. The gain shows up in the gross-margin line within a quarter.
Manufacturers, plant operators, industrial OEMs.
Tribal knowledge sits in inspection reports, work orders, and the heads of operators who are retiring. Deployments capture that knowledge, route work, and run vision QA on the line. Maintenance and quality are the obvious places to start.
Industrial distributors, specialty wholesalers, dealers.
SKU-level chaos is the business. Deployments touch sales-rep enablement, ERP record cleanup, and matching messy customer specs to your catalog. Pricing teams are early winners.
Provider networks, billing groups, ambulatory operators.
Revenue cycle, prior auth, intake, scheduling. Paperwork-heavy back-office work where AI moves the labor line. We don't touch clinical decisions.
Accounting, law, consulting, real estate, insurance.
Document-heavy, judgment-heavy, billable-hour-trapped. Deployments raise the floor on associate work and free partners for the judgment work clients actually value.
What we deploy
Nine systems we build to order. Each one ships to production inside your workflow.
Requests arrive as messy emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets, and your team hand-keys every one. We parse the request, match each line to your catalog and pricing, and draft the quote for a rep to approve.
Quotes out the door in minutes.
Most quotes go out and never get a second touch, and the winnable ones quietly die. We watch your open quotes, draft a timely follow-up, and flag the ones most likely to close.
Quote-to-order conversion up, no added headcount.
Rebate and special-pricing programs carry a huge share of your profit, but the terms live in spreadsheets and claims go unfiled. We pull every contract into a live ledger and flag unclaimed money before it expires.
Margin and cash recovered. Unclaimed balances can run six or seven figures.
Handoff
Every engagement ends with the working system and the operating kit your team needs to own it.
The current process, the target workflow, the human checkpoints, and the systems each step touches.
The operating math behind the build: hours saved, cycle time cut, risk removed, and where the numbers should move.
Real examples from your workflow, scored against the outcomes the system has to hit before it earns trust.
Code, prompts, integration logic, and deployment configuration, held in accounts you control from day one.
How the system works, what to do when it fails, who owns each part, and how your team keeps it current.
The checks that keep accuracy, speed, cost, and edge cases visible after launch.
How we work
The same senior engineer diagnoses the problem, ships the system, and hands it off, so accountability never changes hands. It's the forward-deployed model Palantir pioneered: the engineer works from inside your operation until the system runs.
We embed inside your business. We sit with the people doing the work, read the artifacts, and find the workflows where AI moves your cost lines. You get a deployment plan with honest ROI math you can take to your board, and the first workflow is already running by the time you read it.
We build the system in your workflow, wired to the tools your team already uses, with a person in the loop wherever judgment matters. We pick whichever model wins on your actual work: Claude, GPT, or open-source.
We train your team, write the runbooks, and stay live for the first month post-launch. By the time we leave, your people own the system. We measure ourselves by how quickly you don't need us.
FAQ
You get a working system inside your workflow, not a strategy deck. The same senior engineer stays with you from diagnostic through deployment to handoff: no offshore implementation arm, no scope-creep change orders, no consulting partner you only see at the QBR.
Accipiter is founder-led. Patrick McGovern runs every engagement personally: he is the one in your building, mapping the workflows, and on the hook for the outcome. When a build needs more hands, we bring in named senior engineers, and you meet them before the work starts.
Diagnostics run roughly $25k–60k depending on company size and workflow complexity. Build engagements are fixed-fee in the $150k–450k range, scoped to a specific operating outcome. A first build costs about what a senior AI hire runs in year one, and it ships inside a quarter. Operate retainers are monthly. We don't bill by the hour. If scope grows, we talk before we build.
A diagnostic ends in two to three weeks with one workflow already live in production and a deployment plan for the rest. You can act on it whether or not you continue with us. A first full build is scoped to ship in eight to fourteen weeks, with measurable outcomes within the first month of going live. That pace assumes access to the target systems in week one; the kickoff checklist covers it.
On your systems. Everything we build runs in accounts you control, under your access rules, next to the tools you already use. If you don't have a cloud account, we set one up in your name in the first week. We don't route your data through our servers and we don't train external models on it. For regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, government-adjacent), we use providers and patterns that meet HIPAA, SOC 2, and similar standards. We'll go through your security review before kickoff.
Every deployment starts with a person in the loop: the system drafts, your people approve, and nothing customer-facing goes out on its own until it has earned that autonomy against a test set built from your real work. The runbook covers exactly what to do when it misses.
Yes. It's most of the work. A production AI system nobody uses moves zero P&L. We sit with the people who'll actually use the system, design around how they already work, and write runbooks and training. By the end of a Build engagement, your team is operating the system without us. That's the deliverable.
Less than you'd think. A few hours with the people who do the work during the first week, a contact who can grant system access, and a thirty-minute check-in with a decision-maker each week. We do the building; your team keeps running the business.
The system keeps running. It lives on your stack and your team owns it outright. We stay on call for the first month to answer questions and tune. After that, you can run it yourselves, bring us back for an expansion, or move to an Operate retainer if you want ongoing senior support.
A senior AI lead is hard to hire, hard to retain, and rarely shipping in the first six months. We compress that. Kickoff to deployed system in roughly three months, on a fixed-fee scope. If you want a permanent AI function, we'll help you hire it after the first Build, once you've seen what the work looks like and what kind of person you need on staff.
You do. Everything we touch (code, prompts, evals, runbooks) is yours, in your repo, on your infrastructure. We use open standards and well-known providers, so nothing depends on us to keep working.
Whichever wins on the work. We benchmark candidates against your actual data (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-source) and pick on capability, cost, latency, and where the data needs to live. We don't have a logo to defend.
Traditional businesses whose work runs through documents and judgment calls: services, industrial, distribution, non-clinical healthcare, professional services. If you're a consumer tech company shipping AI features to end users, we're probably not the right fit.
Contact
We take on a few engagements at a time. The first call is thirty minutes. We'll ask what you're trying to change, and tell you honestly whether we can help.
