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CiAConsultancy in ActionAI Operations for Real Businesses

AI Operations for Real Businesses

Your outsourced AI Operations Department

We install, govern, monitor and continuously improve a complete operational AI stack — so your SME gets enterprise-grade AI without hiring an AI team.

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What a “Department in a Box” actually is

The whole model in a couple of minutes — what you actually get when you outsource your AI operations to us, and why it beats an enterprise subscription and a blank chat box.

Read transcript(captions also available on the player)
You buy an Enterprise AI subscription, expecting a tireless new digital worker to join your team. Instead, you are faced with a blank chatbox, an interface that only works if you do the heavy lifting of managing it. A single chatbot is brilliant at answering one-off questions, but it struggles with actual business operations. If you ask it to draft a legal contract, route it for approval, and file it in the correct folder, the system breaks down. It has no memory of your specific procedures and no ability to coordinate multiple sequential tasks. So companies try chaining multiple AI agents together to handle these workflows. But without strict management, these multi-agent clusters create a new kind of chaos. A hallucination from a writing agent gets passed directly to a coding agent, resulting in cascading errors and a spiraling server bell. To move past single chatbots, businesses require a multi-agent system. But crucially, that system needs an organizational structure to supervise the agents, review their work, and control their costs. This table breaks down the current market trap for small to medium enterprises. Hiring a salaried in-house AI lead will easily cost upwards of £60,000 a year. On the other end, buying individual software licenses from vendors only gives you isolated tools, not an operational team. The solution is to stop buying standalone applications and start deploying complete managed AI infrastructure, an operational stack that is governed, monitored and continuously improved. Until you put a management layer over your artificial intelligence, it remains a passive tool. True return on investment requires structural coordination. This is consultancy in action, or CIA. From the user side, it looks and acts like a single, highly approachable colleague. you get one friendly point of contact for your entire business operation. You simply open the chat and give a high-level instruction, like build a new client portal for the marketing team. Behind the interface sits a coordinated workforce of 36 specialist AI agents. A chief of staff assigns subtasks to CEO-class leads, managing workflows, legal, admin, and marketing. They then deploy specialist pods, like copywriters and coders, executing in parallel. You get the depth and output of a full-scale corporate department, completely managed for you through one simple conversation. Bringing 36 autonomous agents together raises a serious engineering question. How do you stop them from stepping on each other's toes? The answer is a dual-layer orchestration system. The top business layer, Paperclip, acts as management, handling task delegation, budgets, and approvals. Beneath it, the technical execution layer, Agent OS, acts as a governor, enforcing strict coding standards to eliminate architectural drift. This governance-first design comes directly from the founder of Consultancy in Action, Sandy Segel. Sandy's methodology draws from three years of doctoral research in economics and hands-on experience designing machine learning models for the highly regulated credit ratings industry. His rigorous focus on risk stems from academic tenure under a senior researcher who brought AI directly into Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. Scaling an autonomous workforce requires strict bonner sight. It is an economic governance problem masquerading as a software engineering problem. For a modern business, this dual-layered architecture delivers exactly what was promised at the start of the AI boom, comprehensive, everyday automation where you maintain total operational control. You dictate how much independence the system has on a task-by-task basis. You can set an agent to live so it acts immediately, draft so it prepares work for your review, or simply dormant to turn it off completely. To eliminate financial risk, the system enforces hard caps on your daily spending. Because it maintains an immutable audit trail, you can review exactly how every piece of work was completed. For high-stakes operations like publishing or sending payments, the system triggers human sign-off gates. Agents wait for your explicit approval before proceeding. Companies no longer need to hire expensive in-house development teams to build custom workflows from scratch. They just need to plug into a pre-governed, autonomous infrastructure that works out of the box. Consultancy in Action delivers enterprise-grade coordination with central bank rigor, designed and priced for small to medium enterprises. To put this architecture to work for your team, visit consultancy in action today.

What we do

Four services.One engine.

Most consultancies stop at strategy. Most software vendors stop at a product. We deliver and run the system — discovery, deployment, day-to-day operations and the training that makes it stick.

All services

AI Discovery

£1,500–£5,000

A paid, structured deep-dive that turns gut-feel into a costed roadmap.

Learn more about AI Discovery

Infrastructure Deployment

£5,000–£25,000+

We install and configure the full operational AI stack — not just a chatbot.

Learn more about Infrastructure Deployment

Managed AI Operations

From £500/mo · minimum 12-month term

Your outsourced AI Operations Department on a monthly retainer.

Learn more about Managed AI Operations

Training & Governance

£500–£2,000 per workshop

Practical training so the team uses AI confidently, safely and well.

Learn more about Training & Governance

Why Consultancy in Action

Built, not just briefed

Our stack isn’t theoretical — we’ve designed, built and tested the underlying multi-agent infrastructure ourselves. That’s why we can deploy it for clients in weeks, not quarters.

Internally-built agentic stack

Hermes multi-agent framework, Paperclip orchestration, approval workflows, budget controls and observability — the same stack we run ourselves.

Governance-first

Human oversight, audit trails and budget caps are designed in, not bolted on. We answer the security and control concerns SMEs actually have.

Local-first & hybrid

Sensitive data can stay on your hardware. A genuine differentiator for legal, healthcare, financial and regulated work.

How we work

A six-step path from curiosity to a running system

No discovery decks that gather dust. Every step ends with something you can use — a score, a report, a deployed system or a monthly improvement cycle.

See the full process
  1. AI Readiness Assessment (free, 3 minutes)
  2. Initial consultation (free, 30 minutes)
  3. Paid AI Opportunity Assessment
  4. Proposal and architecture design
  5. Implementation project
  6. 12-month managed-services agreement

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