APPLIED AI

We build the AI that has to work.

When AI faces your customers, your patients, your revenue, or your regulators, it has to behave. We work where the demo ends and rigor takes over.

THE THESIS

In high-stakes AI, proof is the foundation. Reinvention is the payoff.

FIRST, TRUST IT

Know your AI behaves

Evals that define correct behavior. Red-teaming against the failure modes your system is actually exposed to. Runtime guardrails and continuous observability across your people and your agents, so quality issues get caught before they spread. Behavior stays proven as models change and autonomy grows.

THEN, EXPAND IT

Run more of the company on it

A reliable foundation is what makes the rest safe to build: agentic workflows in operations, AI in the product, custom models for pricing and forecasting, roles and structure redesigned on evidence. Each new system starts with the proof already in place.

The order matters. Companies that start with scattered builds accumulate systems nobody fully trusts, and the work stalls in pilots and legal review. Companies that start with proof compound, because every fix leaves something behind: eval suites that encode your standards, observability that is already watching, data made legible for whatever comes next.

This is how a company actually reinvents how it runs: one serious fix at a time, on a foundation that accrues until running on it is simply how the company works.

HOW WE ENGAGE

One slice, built to compound.

Every engagement is a vertical slice: one high-stakes system, taken through the loop below and made to pass in production. The way the slice is built is the point. The evals, the legible data, and the instruments it leaves behind are groundwork, so the next slice starts ahead of the last, and enough slices become the transformation.

THE FLOW

Define. Instrument. Test. Fix. Refine. Expand.

The same sequence every time, whether the system already runs in production or we build the first version together.

Start with a diagnostic →
01
Define what working means.

Every engagement starts with the question most AI projects skip: what does it mean for this system to work as intended? A support agent that never invents policy. A pricing model that protects margins on every route. A children's product that stays safe under a determined jailbreak. The definition also sets the balance among quality, speed, and cost: how good is good enough, how fast it has to be, and what each task is worth spending. Most of it lives in your experts' heads, and extracting it is real work we do with them. Writing it down takes product judgment as much as engineering, and it becomes the standard everything else answers to.

02
Instrument the standard.

We codify the definition into testable evals, and an observability framework that watches results in the wild, with real customers and real employees using the system. The suites start from a library we have accrued across engagements (child safety, privacy, injection, escalation) and grow with the cases only your business would think to test. We use assurance and security techniques grounded in our frontier alignment research: evals, red-teaming, guardrails, and monitoring.

03
Test against it.

If you already run a system, we measure it against the standard. If you don't, we build the leanest version worth testing and measure that. You get an honest read: safe to ship, or a ranked list of what fails and why, with what the system does not do stated just as plainly.

04
Fix the root cause.

The failures point somewhere specific: the data, the people, the process, or the model itself. Most often it is the data, so we make your company's data legible to agents and fix it where it lives. When it is the people, we train them inside the work. When prompting tops out, we build the model.

Refine and optimize.

Production teaches you what the definition missed. Behavior you didn't anticipate becomes new eval cases, the standard gets stricter where reality demands it, and the next pass through the loop starts sharper than the last. The evals are a living artifact: they version with your system, and refining them is part of the watching. They are also what makes optimization safe: once a system passes, you can swap in smaller and cheaper models, tune for speed, and prove the quality held. The standard is how you buy cost down without buying risk.

Expand and transform.

More workflows, product surfaces, and models, each new system starting with the instrumentation already in place. The instruments merge into an intelligence layer: observability, extended across the whole business, your agents in the wild and your people in one picture, showing where the next slice should go. Enough slices and this is the transformation: the company runs on AI it can prove.

Engineered for handover: your team runs more of it as fluency grows. See the full engagement →

WHERE TO START

How you get started.

Pick one high-stakes challenge where working AI would create real leverage.

We take it through the loop and make it pass in production, with the groundwork laid underneath it. If you already run AI, the slice starts with a diagnostic.

And if a quick prototype is all the job needs, you don't need us, and we'll say so.

Bring us the challenge

SHIPPED WORK

Production results, measured.

$6M/week new revenue

Azul Airlines

Orchestrated pricing, network, and marketing AI. 8+ production ML models running daily inside the airline's environment.

Read the case →
Top 1-2% nationally

Alpha School

AlphaRead, Avatar Tutors, Fluency Coach, Essay Writing, Timeback, and DreamLauncher: an AI-native learning platform shipped into real classrooms.

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90% less back-office overhead

Global Shop Solutions

AI document ingestion turning messy invoices and vendor quotes into structured ERP data at 95% accuracy. Shipped in ~5 weeks.

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MoveAgain BCI platform

Blackrock Neurotech

Production software for a brain-computer interface that helps paralyzed patients regain movement and communication.

Read the case →

See all work →

WHO BUILDS THIS

The team behind the system.

Alignment research informs every layer

We do frontier alignment research with DARPA and Anthropic. We study how autonomous systems fail: compounding sycophancy, reality distortion, oversight evasion, goal drift. Those findings go directly into the guardrails, evaluations, and governance architecture we build for clients. As autonomy increases, alignment has to keep pace.

We run this system ourselves

AE operates this architecture across our own projects, deals, and people. The knowledge graph, the intelligence loops, the agentic workflows. We've hit the edge cases and debugged the integration quirks. The system we build for you is the system we run every day.

Strategy and engineering in the same room

The people who understand the models are the same people who ship the systems. You get a ranked set of bets your team can test, build, and measure. The same team that maps the opportunity builds the first version.

Built to advance with the field

AI capabilities move fast. We track every development in models, alignment research, and agentic patterns, and we architect systems to be adapted as new capabilities unlock. Your system is designed to get better over time, and we stay with you to make that happen.

The gap opens before the incident.

Most companies fund reliability after something breaks in front of a customer or a regulator, and by then it is a cleanup project with a deadline. Companies that build it in early get the opposite: systems they can extend with confidence, and a foundation that compounds while competitors sit stalled in pilots and legal review. The cheapest time to make AI reliable is now.

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