What an AI Development Company Actually Builds
The five shapes of commercial AI work, how it is scoped, and when an off-the-shelf tool is the right answer
An AI development company builds software whose behaviour comes from a model rather than from hand-written rules: retrieval over your own documents, assistants that act inside your systems, and document processing at volume. Most of the work is data, integration and measurement. Here is what each shape involves, when an off-the-shelf tool is enough instead, and the questions that separate a production build from a demo.