AI agent development for UK teams that ship.

Strong. India Standard Time is GMT+5:30, which gives roughly four to five hours of native daily overlap with UK business hours — our 1:30pm IST is your 8am GMT, and our 6:30pm IST is your 1pm GMT. Daily standups, twice-weekly demos of the agent in action, and most ad-hoc debugging land inside that window without late-night calls on either side. For UK clients who prefer afternoon-onwards working, we can extend coverage to 8pm IST (2:30pm GMT) on a planned cadence. Written async updates go out daily before your standup with eval-run results and any agent regressions caught overnight.

Yes. Engagement defaults align with UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, and ICO published guidance on AI and automated decision-making. Every model and tool call the agent makes is audit-logged with input, output, prompt version, tool schema version, and the operator or end-user identity — exportable for ICO inspection. A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) is run for any agent processing personal data at scale or making decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects on a data subject. Refusal copy and a human handoff path are scoped before launch, not after.

Yes. We sign UK GDPR-aligned Data Processing Agreements covering the Article 28 processor obligations: processing only on documented instructions, confidentiality of personnel, security of processing, sub-processor management, data subject rights assistance, breach notification, and deletion or return of personal data at the end of the engagement. International transfers of personal data are covered by the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK addendum, as your DPO prefers. We will work from your DPA template or provide ours.

Yes — that is the most common UK deployment pattern we run. We work inside your AWS, Azure, or GCP account in any UK or EU region you specify, using your IAM, your VPC, and your customer-managed encryption keys. For LLM inference, we route to UK or EU endpoints on Claude (Anthropic) and GPT-4o (Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service in UK South), or we self-host Llama 3 on vLLM inside your VPC if your team requires zero third-party inference. The agent's tool calls stay inside your network. No data leaves your cloud unless your runbook says it should.

Either. Most repeat UK clients move to a Master Services Agreement after the first engagement so subsequent agent builds, evals work, and on-call retainers ship under a per-project Statement of Work without renegotiating the umbrella terms. For a first engagement, a standalone SOW with the DPA appended is the standard pattern. We will work from your legal team's MSA template or provide ours; legal turnaround is usually one to two weeks depending on your DPO's review cadence.

We have shipped KYC automation agents, fraud signal extraction, deterministic-output compliance copilots, and audit-trailed claim-handling agents for fintech and insurtech operators in the UK and EU. We treat FCA Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SM&CR) accountability seriously — every model and tool call is audit-logged with input, output, prompt version, and operator identity, so the senior manager accountable for the system has the evidence to defend it. The agent does not make autonomous regulatory decisions; humans approve everything that touches a regulated outcome.

Most v1 agent engagements at Aiinfox land between £20,000 and £100,000 fixed-price for a focused build — a customer-support agent, an internal-ops agent, a voice pipeline, or an FCA-aware compliance copilot. Larger multi-quarter engagements with custom evals, fine-tuning, and integration into a regulated platform typically reach £150,000 to £250,000. The cost difference versus a London AI consultancy lands roughly 30 to 50 percent lower on senior rates — but the headline is that the engineer on your kickoff call writes your code, not that you are paying City rates for a partner who routes the work to a junior pool.

Yes — takeover audits are routine. Step one is reading the code, the prompts, the tool schemas, the eval results (if any exist), and the cost telemetry. Step two is shipping the smallest valuable change — usually an eval harness or an audit-log layer — to prove we understand the system. Step three is the longer-term plan: incremental stabilisation, a parallel rebuild, or shutting it down and starting over. Most takeovers we see did not need a full rewrite; they needed evals, refusal layers, observability, and a senior engineer on the build. We will be honest on the first call.