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UBS
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Credit Suisse
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BNP Paribas
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Deutsche Bank
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Citibank
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AT&T
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PepsiCo
From AI experiments to AI-native engineering
The shift to AI-native ways of working has moved past pilots. The organisations getting durable value from AI are the ones treating it as a full-stack engineering transformation, embedded into the software development lifecycle, integrated into product architecture, and supported by the model governance, data quality and developer enablement that production AI actually requires.
Innovative delivers that transformation end-to-end. We work alongside your team across the full arc: advisory and use case discovery, AI strategy and roadmap, platform and product development, agent and model engineering, and AI-augmented developer enablement that lifts the productivity of your existing engineers. Our airisDATA practice has been shipping production AI inside tier-1 banks since 2015, and we bring that engineering rigour to commercial AI use cases across financial services, telecom, retail and life sciences.
We meet you where you are on the AI-native journey, whether you are still defining the strategy or scaling your third production deployment.
Our AI Engineering Services
AI Strategy and Discovery
Most AI initiatives stall before they start because the business case, the data readiness, and the integration paths were never properly aligned. We work with your business and engineering leaders to identify the highest-value AI use cases, assess feasibility, and build a roadmap that aligns to your enterprise architecture.
Our discovery process is short and structured. Typical timelines are four to eight weeks for a focused use case discovery, longer for enterprise-wide AI strategy. We come out of discovery with a prioritised roadmap, a recommended engagement model, a build-versus-buy view on the platform layer, and the AI governance framework you will need to keep regulators comfortable.
- AI use case identification and prioritisation
- Feasibility and ROI modelling against business outcomes
- Data readiness and infrastructure assessment
- Model selection (closed-source frontier models versus open-source self-hosted)
- AI governance and model risk framework design
- Platform selection across AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks and Snowflake
AI Platform and Product Engineering
We design, build and ship the platforms and products that put AI into production. Agent platforms, ML platforms, RAG systems, custom model fine-tuning, and the enterprise integration that connects AI to your CRMs, ERPs, data platforms and customer experiences.
Our platform engineering work spans foundation model integration, model serving infrastructure, vector store engineering, prompt management and orchestration, retrieval pipelines, and the observability layer production AI requires. Built on production-grade frameworks like LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex and Semantic Kernel, with custom orchestration where the off-the-shelf frameworks fall short. Product engineering covers AI features built into your existing applications, new AI-native products built greenfield, and the integration work that makes AI useful inside your business processes.
AI Agent Development and Agentic Platforms
Production AI agents that automate workflows, support decision-making and integrate into your enterprise architecture. Custom single-purpose agents, multi-agent systems where specialised agents collaborate, and the full agentic platform infrastructure that scales agent deployment across your organisation.
This work is detailed on our Agentic AI page. The short version: we build with LangGraph, custom MCP servers, agentic RAG, and the human-in-the-loop and governance frameworks regulators expect. We are aligned to UBS's 2030 AI strategy on agentic AI for financial advisors and have transferable IP across agent orchestration, decision engines and explainability.
AI-Augmented Developer Enablement
AI is changing how software gets built, not just what software does. The teams that move fastest are deploying AI-assisted coding tools across their engineering organisations, building maturity models, and measuring productivity uplift.
We work with the major AI coding platforms, including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Anthropic's Claude IDE integrations. The work covers tool selection and deployment, custom rulesets for your codebase and architecture standards, developer training programmes, productivity measurement and benchmarking, and the internal AI tooling and developer experience platforms that make adoption durable past the initial enthusiasm. This is one of the fastest-changing areas of enterprise AI; the vendors that landed in the market in 2024 are being repriced and resorted in 2026. We track the space actively and bring opinionated recommendations.
AI Governance, Validation and Model Risk
The regulatory bar for production AI has hardened. The FDA's January 2025 draft guidance on AI for regulatory decision-making, the joint FDA-EMA guiding principles released in January 2026, the EU AI Act, and SR 11-7 model risk management for banking all set higher standards for model validation, biological credibility, explainability and human oversight.
We bring the explainability frameworks, validated training pipelines, model registries and audit trail tooling we have built for tier-1 banks under SR 11-7. The same patterns apply directly to FDA, EMA and EU AI Act regimes, and to internal model risk programmes at any large enterprise.
- Explainable AI (XAI) and decision-engine instrumentation
- Model validation frameworks aligned to your regulatory regime
- Audit-ready model registries with full lineage
- Bias detection and human-oversight workflow design
- FAIR data implementation for proprietary data assets
AI Run, Monitor and Optimise
AI systems need continuous monitoring, retraining and adaptation. The model that worked at launch will degrade. The cost profile that looked reasonable at pilot scale will surprise you at production volume.
We provide ongoing AI lifecycle management as a managed service or as embedded support inside your team. Coverage includes AI observability and behaviour monitoring, model drift detection and triggered retraining, performance optimisation and cost management (FinOps for AI), compliance review and ongoing governance, and expansion of AI capabilities into adjacent use cases as the original deployment proves out.
How we work: three engagement models
We meet you where you are on the AI-native journey. Three engagement models, designed to flex into one another mid-engagement when scope changes.
Advisory and Discovery
Short, focused engagements (four to eight weeks) to identify use cases, assess feasibility, and build the roadmap. Best when your AI strategy is still forming and you need the diligence done before committing capital. Output is a prioritised roadmap, an architecture view, and a recommended engagement model for the next phase.
Enablement
Embed our AI engineers into your existing teams to upskill them on AI-native development, deploy AI-assisted coding tools, and accelerate your first production deployments. Best when the strategy is set but internal capability is still building. Engagements typically run three to six months and end with your team owning the work.
Execution
Outcome-based delivery for full platform builds, agent development, model engineering and ML platform delivery. We own the team, the deliverables and the SLAs. Best for defined-scope production work where speed and accountability matter more than internal capability building.
How an AI engineering engagement works
- Discovery and use case alignment. We start by understanding your business priorities, technical landscape, data readiness and the AI use cases with the strongest ROI. Output: a prioritised roadmap and a recommended engagement model.
- Architecture and design. Define the AI platform, agent architecture, model strategy, integration paths and governance framework. Output: a technical blueprint and delivery plan.
- Build and deploy. Engineering execution against the blueprint. Model development, platform engineering, integration, and pilot deployment in a controlled environment.
- Scale and embed. Production rollout, AI-augmented developer enablement to lift the rest of your engineering organisation, and the governance and observability that production AI requires.
- Run and optimise. Ongoing model retraining, observability, performance tuning and expansion of AI capabilities into adjacent use cases.
Industry-specific AI engineering
- Financial services. Agentic AI for financial advisors, automated trade reconciliation, regulatory data quality automation, RWA forecasting, on-demand VaR, contract review, KYC/AML anomaly detection, real-time fraud detection.
- Telecom and media. Network anomaly detection, customer churn prediction, dynamic pricing, content recommendation, OTT quality analytics, AI-assisted customer support.
- Retail and CPG. Personalisation and recommendation, demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, computer vision for shelf and store, conversational shopping, post-sale support.
- Pharmaceuticals and life sciences. AI for formulation and process development, clinical trial site selection, patient cohort identification, pharmacovigilance signal detection, regulatory submission automation, validated AI engineering aligned to FDA and EMA guidance.
- Healthcare. Risk prediction and stratification, readmission forecasting, sepsis early warning, clinical document understanding, conversational AI for patient and clinician experience, agentic care coordination.
- Enterprise functions. Internal copilots and knowledge agents, IT operations anomaly detection, automated reporting, document understanding, HR and finance workflow automation.
Why Innovative for AI Engineering
- 12 years of production AI delivery in regulated industries through our airisDATA practice
- 5 tier-1 bank clients with running production AI systems including UBS, Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Citibank
- 150+ engineers across Princeton, Hyderabad and Pune
- Regulator-ready by default, with XAI, validated pipelines and audit-ready model registries
- Hybrid onshore-offshore model producing 24-hour development cycles
- Reusable IP including the RWA Forecast Challenger, Smart Reconciliation, Finance Data Hub, Automated Contract Review, and Active Data Quality
- WBENC-certified MWBE qualifying for diversity-spend programmes at Fortune 500 enterprises
Frequently Asked Questions
- How fast can we get from kickoff to a production AI deployment?
- Depends on the use case and your data readiness. A focused use case with clean data and clear integration paths can ship in 12 to 16 weeks. Enterprise-wide AI platforms run longer, typically six to twelve months for the first production deployment, with subsequent use cases shipping faster as the platform matures.
- Do you build with closed-source or open-source foundation models?
- Both. We recommend based on your data sensitivity, latency, accuracy and cost requirements. Closed-source frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) often win for complex reasoning at lower volumes. Open-source models (Llama, Mistral, and others) often win for sensitive proprietary data, high-volume inference, and predictable cost profiles. We are not aligned to any one foundation model vendor.
- Can you work inside our existing tooling and cloud accounts?
- Yes. We work in your cloud accounts, your CI/CD, your developer environments, and your security posture. We are not pushing a proprietary platform.
- How do you handle model risk and explainability?
- This is core to how we build. Every production model we ship comes with explainability tooling, audit trails, validation documentation, and the governance framework regulators in your industry expect. We brought these patterns over from SR 11-7 model risk management at tier-1 banks.
- What does pricing look like?
- We work on staff augmentation, fixed-scope managed delivery, and outcome-based engagements. Hybrid onshore-offshore pricing keeps blended rates competitive without sacrificing onshore architecture and oversight. Onshore engineers run $72 to $87 per hour, offshore $27 to $31. Outcome-based pricing is scoped per engagement.