We don’t skip stages.
Not once.
§
Northwind runs every engagement through the same five-stage process, from readiness assessment to production operation. It is slower than a hackathon build, and it is why our systems are still running six months later.
Assess
2–5 weeks
Design
1–2 weeks
Build
4–12 weeks
Deploy
1–2 weeks
Operate
Ongoing
Trusted in production by
Meridian Trust
Alderleaf
Cobalt Mutual
Ferrovia
Northfield & Cole
Hearn Whitby
01 · The process, in full
Five stages.
Every engagement, no exceptions.
This is what actually happens between “we signed the contract” and “it’s running in production.”
i
2–5 weeks · Fixed fee
Assess
Readiness, data audit and use-case prioritisation. Ends in a roadmap you can fund, and sometimes in a clear “not yet”.
Use cases scored on one matrix
Typ. 15–25
Roadmap with budget bands
12 months
ii
1–2 weeks
Design
Architecture, evaluation plan and guardrails defined before a line of production code. The go / no-go metric is signed here.
Gold evaluation set
200+ cases
Human review thresholds
Per field
iii
4–12 weeks
Build
The system, integrated into the tools your team already uses, scored against the gold set every week so nobody is surprised at launch.
Weekly eval runs
Every Friday
Code in your repositories
From day one
iv
1–2 weeks
Deploy
Shadow mode against live traffic, then production, monitored from the first request rather than bolted on after an incident.
Shadow mode
2–3 weeks
One-click rollback
< 5 min
v
Ongoing
Operate
Drift monitoring, scheduled retraining and a clear handoff to your team’s ownership, or a Retainer if you would rather we keep running it.
Drift monitoring
Continuous
Quarterly review
With the builders
03 · What each stage draws on
The same eight capabilities,
recombined for your workflow.
01
Language model orchestration
Routing, retries and cost ceilings across models.
02
Retrieval & vector search
Grounded answers with citations you can audit.
03
Agent frameworks & tool use
Typed tools, human checkpoints, full traces.
04
Document extraction & OCR
Field-level confidence, not page-level guesses.
05
Forecasting & time series
Models that report their own drift.
06
MLOps
Training, deployment and monitoring as code.
07
Data pipelines & warehousing
Versioned sources with lineage.
08
Evaluation & guardrails
Gold sets, red-teaming and release gates.
04 · What comes out the other end
Six services,
one process behind all of them.
06
Services, one team
05 · The process, applied
Same five stages.
Four different industries.
64
Systems in production
$41M
Value, trailing 12 months
11 wks
Median to launch
0
Stages skipped
06 · Where to enter the process
Enter at any stage.
Most start at the first.
Assessment
Know what to build
Teams with an AI budget and no shared way to prioritise between use cases.
From
$18k
2–5 weeks
Data & infrastructure audit
Use-case matrix: effort, risk, payback
Build-vs-buy per use case
12-month roadmap with budget bands
Pilot
Most popular
Prove it works
Teams with a specific use case who need to prove it before a full build.
From
$65k
6–10 weeks
One system, scoped to ship fast
Evaluation harness before launch
Guardrails and human checkpoints
A clear go / no-go on scaling
Scale
Run it for real
Teams taking a proven use case to full production volume.
From
$180k
3–6 months
Full engineering team
Monitoring and alerting from day one
Integration with systems of record
Runbooks and an agreed handoff
Retainer
Keep it accurate
Teams who want us to keep operating a system after launch.
From
$12k
per month
Drift detection and monitoring
Scheduled eval and retraining
Incident SLA
Quarterly roadmap review
07 · In their words
Renee Castellano
Meridian Trust Bank
Dr. Aaron Mbeki
Alderleaf Health Network
Lindsay Oduya
Cobalt Mutual Insurance
Tom Baptiste
Ferrovia Logistics
Whitney Sarr
Orinda Freight Co.
“
We didn’t want a black box making credit decisions, and Northwind didn’t build us one. The agent does the tedious cross-checking and tells us exactly why it flagged what it flagged. Our underwriters trust it because they can see its work.
Renee Castellano
VP of Loan Operations · Meridian Trust Bank
−63% review time
08 · Start
Start with
stage one.
A 30-minute readiness call is the first hour of the Assess stage. You keep what comes out of it either way.