Capability areas
AI consulting services
1AYM is an AI consulting firm. We help leadership, operations and engineering teams find where AI will pay back, build it into the systems their people already use, and put in the controls their risk team will ask for. The work runs from a two-to-four-week AI strategy sprint to senior engineers inside your own programme, and it starts with a 30-minute call.
The nine capability areas below share one aim: to move an organisation from scattered AI experiments to production systems it can reuse and govern. Every engineer on the work is certified on the platforms we build on or has shipped inside a top-tier engineering organisation, and we scale the team to the contract. Our clients are across the UK, the US and the Gulf, and most buy the work as one of the five named engagements on the homepage.
C-01
AI strategy and roadmap
We turn a board's AI ambition into a plan that can be funded and built. Leadership sessions and an opportunity map show where the value sits, a feasibility check against your data and systems settles build versus buy, and the work ends in a roadmap with a governance review. The same team writes the business case and the engineering plan, and the gap between those two is where most AI programmes stall.
C-02
AI harness & platform engineering
Your engineers are already using vendor harnesses such as Codex, Claude Code and Cursor. We put architecture, skills packages, guardrails and CI around them, so the code those tools write reaches production the same way as every other change, and the company is not locked into one vendor's stack.
C-03
Production AI systems
We build internal copilots, workflow agents, voice agents and the middleware between them to run against real data every working day. The design work goes into access, permissions, auditability, failure modes and human review, because those decide whether a system survives contact with your operations.
C-04
Agentic workflow design
Our agentic workflows follow one pattern: the agent proposes and a verifier decides. The model does the flexible reasoning, while deterministic rules, schemas, tests and human review decide whether anything is allowed to proceed. The pattern is built for finance, data migration and compliance work, where mostly correct is another way of saying wrong.
C-05
Data platform & AI enablement
We connect AI to the numbers the business already trusts, through warehouse integrations, semantic-layer work, data contracts, reconciliation and reporting an AI system can read. The test is simple: an answer from the assistant should match the one the finance team would have given, definition for definition.
C-06
AI integration and automation services
We build the middleware, syncs and APIs that put AI inside the tools your teams already use, and we do the unglamorous parts properly. That means idempotent writes, dry-run modes, rollback paths, audit logs, rate-limit handling and daily runs that finish.
C-07
Fractional AI implementation team
This is a retained senior team for a programme that has the budget and the mandate but nobody to own the technical decisions or build the platform. The team sets the target architecture, makes the vendor and model choices, builds alongside your engineers, runs delivery governance and does the enablement that hands all of it to your own team. It typically runs two to three days a week under one statement of work.
C-08
Embedded Engineers on Contract
We place a senior engineer, or a team, inside your programme on a contract from three months, and you direct the work day to day. Every engineer meets the same hiring standard as the rest of 1AYM, and 1AYM holds the cover, so a stream never hangs off one person.
C-09
AI governance implementation
We make an AI policy enforceable in the system itself. The system checks permissions before it acts, verifier gates sit on the actions that can cause harm, evaluation runs in CI, the gates produce their own audit trail, and data residency is architected in where a region is a requirement. We do this during the platform build, the only point at which it is cheap.
How it is bought
Five named engagements
They come in three commercial shapes: a fixed-scope statement of work, a retained implementation engagement, or engineers embedded in your own programme. A job you have already scoped can be resourced on contract from the collective of associates who work with the firm, held to the same standard as the rest of 1AYM.
| Dimension | Who buys it | Commercial shape | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Opportunity & Feasibility Sprint | C-suite and transformation leads | Fixed scope · typically 2–4 weeks | Find out which two or three workflows are worth building, what each is worth and what it would cost, before you commit a budget to any of them. |
| Enterprise AI Platform & Agentic Workflows | CIO, CTO, CDO, operations and finance | Fixed-scope architecture, then a production build | Turn scattered pilots into one governed place for AI to run, then put real workflows on it. Access rules, checks and human approval are built in, so the second workflow does not start from scratch the way the first one did. |
| AI Engineering Transformation | Engineering leaders | Typically 6–12 weeks · enablement, guardrails and CI | Your engineers are already using coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code, with or without a policy. This puts review, guardrails and CI around that, so the code it writes reaches production the same way every other change does. |
| Fractional AI Implementation Team | Scale-ups and enterprises | Retained · typically 2–3 days a week · one statement of work | Senior architecture, hands-on implementation and enablement without hiring a permanent AI platform team. We own the technical decisions, build with your engineers and leave them able to run it. |
| Embedded Engineers on Contract | Programmes that need senior capacity now | Contract · from three months | A senior engineer, or a team, inside your programme on contract. You direct the work day to day, and we hold the standard every 1AYM engineer is hired against, plus the cover behind them. |
Public-sector buyers can work with 1AYM through G-Cloud via our partner BAPRO. BAPRO is the delivery partner and 1AYM is the AI partner, across everything 1AYM offers. See how public bodies buy our work through G-Cloud, and which UK guidance we build to.
The vocabulary
Terms and guides, in full
Each term and buyer question behind the areas above has a page of its own. Our guides to buying AI services sort the same pages, with the comparisons and the readiness assessment, by the question a buyer is asking.
Start with one problem
Send us a short brief on it. We will tell you which area it belongs to and where the work should start.
To score yourself first, the free AI readiness assessment asks 13 questions on ownership, data, systems and controls, and shows your result and a next step on the page.
Last reviewed · 1AYM
Questions
Common questions
What does 1AYM sell?
Nine capability areas, bought as five named engagements: the AI Opportunity & Feasibility Sprint, the Enterprise AI Platform & Agentic Workflows build, the AI Engineering Transformation, the Fractional AI Implementation Team and Embedded Engineers on Contract.
How long do engagements take and how are they priced?
The AI Opportunity & Feasibility Sprint is fixed scope, typically two to four weeks. The AI Engineering Transformation typically runs six to twelve weeks. Embedded Engineers on Contract start from three months and are priced per day: day rates start at £750 to £1,250, depending on seniority and the project. Fixed-scope work is quoted after scoping.
Who can help us put AI into production?
1AYM. Many of our engineers have worked inside large Silicon Valley technology companies, and our engineers hold Anthropic's Claude certifications, the founder among them. They are senior engineers who build working systems, priced by the day from £750, with no six-figure slide decks. Book a 30-minute call or email enquiries@1aym.com.