Frequently asked questions

Book a free 30-minute discovery call. If there's a fit, we either send a fixed-price proposal or, where the work needs designing first, agree a short paid scoping piece. Either way the scope, price and delivery date are fixed before anything is built, and there's no obligation if it isn't the right fit.

We design, build, and deploy alongside your team, not in a black box. Weekly checkpoints, training built in, and full knowledge transfer at handover. Your team owns the system after we leave; we don't sell dependency.

10 to 200 person UK service and industrial businesses. Our deepest experience is in marine and offshore engineering; we also work with manufacturing, field service, and energy and infrastructure businesses. If your operations are process-heavy and your tools are fragmented, we're a good fit. We do not work with early-stage startups without established processes, or with companies wanting to 'explore AI' without a real operational problem to solve.

Every solution is built with UK GDPR and data protection in mind from day one. We handle Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) when required, and we'll flag any process where AI introduces compliance risk before we build it.

No. Often the right answer is a workflow automation, a cleaner data pipeline, or a better-shaped process. If the problem doesn't need AI, we'll tell you in the first conversation, even if you came expecting an AI project.

No. Our clients are operations leaders, finance leads, and owner-managers, not CTOs. Every system ships with documentation, video guides, and training so your team owns and runs it without us. If you do have technical staff and want them involved in the build, co-implementation often produces the strongest outcomes because adoption is faster.

Projects ship working software in 2 to 6 weeks, not months. A Quick Win (one workflow, one pain point) ships in 2 to 3 weeks. A Standard project (fully integrated AI or automation with team training) ships in 4 to 6 weeks. We name the delivery date upfront in the proposal.

We won't quote a number before we've seen your operation. In the discovery call we agree what to measure (hours spent, errors, how long a report takes), record where you are today, and measure the same things again at a review point we agree before handover, so you can see the return instead of taking our word for it.

Established platforms like Make, n8n and Zapier, plus custom code where a platform would be a poor fit. The choice follows the systems you already run, not the other way round.

A single workflow is usually live in 2 to 3 weeks. A fully integrated system takes 4 to 6. The delivery date is agreed in writing before work starts.

Usually. Most business software can be connected through an API or a scheduled export. We check yours during scoping and tell you plainly if one of them cannot be reached.

Every automation ships with monitoring, alerting and a fallback path, so a failure raises an alert rather than quietly stopping. You can keep that monitoring with us or run it yourself.

We use providers that offer UK or EU data residency and contractual terms against training on your content, and where a project needs it we can run the model privately instead. We agree which of those applies during scoping, in writing, before any of your material is used.

No. We implement AI to handle the routine tasks your staff don't want to do, freeing them for higher-value work that requires human judgement.

You give access to your documents, procedures and worked examples, and we do the technical work: configure it, test it against questions you already know the answer to, and keep adjusting until you are happy with what comes back.

Assume it sometimes will, and build for it. Answers cite the document behind them so your team can check, uncertain questions go to a person instead of being guessed at, and nothing goes to a client without someone signing it off.

Accounting software, CRMs, job and project systems, spreadsheets, databases and most custom systems. We check yours during scoping and say plainly if one of them cannot be reached, rather than finding out mid-build.

No. We design dashboards and reports that business users can understand and interact with without technical skills.

Accuracy depends on your data quality and history. We're transparent about confidence levels and continuously improve models as more data becomes available.

We work with Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and custom solutions depending on your existing Microsoft or Google ecosystem and specific needs.

10 to 200 person UK service and industrial businesses, with our deepest experience in marine and offshore engineering. The recommendations assume a real budget and a team with no AI specialists in it.

Yes. We can take projects from strategy through implementation, or hand off to your team with clear specifications. Either way, we ensure the strategy is actionable.

That's valuable to know. Our assessment will identify prerequisites and help you build foundations before investing in AI tools.

4 to 6 weeks, covering interviews with the people who do the work, analysis, and the roadmap itself. The date is agreed before it starts.

No. The base pack (health endpoints, runbook, recovery scripts and monitoring while the system beds in) is included with every Cognify build. Carrying on with managed monitoring afterwards is a monthly Improvement Phase plan, priced before you decide.

Playbooks are scoped and reversible: restart a service, redeploy a known-good version, never delete data. If a fix doesn't work, the system escalates instead of trying anything destructive.

No. The health endpoint returns service status and version only. Personal data is kept out of monitoring by design, and we put a Data Processing Agreement in place covering the access we do have.

Usually, if we can add the health middleware to it. Systems we did not build are assessed first, because some vendor-hosted products do not allow it.

You keep the runbook, recovery scripts, and health endpoints. Any in-house developer or partner can continue using them. Nothing locks you in.