Business experience first.
AI capability second.
Transformer Ai is a small, specialist consultancy helping SMEs navigate the AI landscape with honesty, pragmatism, and 30 years of hard-won business experience behind every recommendation.
- 30+
- Years of SME business experience
- 10+
- AI and platform integrations
- 3
- Levels of AI readiness served
- 1
- Rule: no complexity without purpose
We didn't start as coders who discovered business. We started as business people who discovered AI.
Transformer Ai was founded on a simple observation: most AI consultancies are staffed by technologists who struggle to communicate with the people running actual businesses. The jargon, the complexity, and the tendency to reach for the most powerful tool rather than the most appropriate one leaves SME founders and MDs with expensive implementations that their teams cannot use and that do not solve the problem they started with.
With over 30 years of experience running and advising small and medium businesses — before writing a line of production AI code — we came at this from the other direction. We understand payroll constraints, decision-making under uncertainty, the reality of staff capability, and the difference between a feature that looks impressive in a demo and one that people actually use every day.
We are deliberately small. We do not scale headcount to win contracts, and we do not take referral income from technology vendors. The advice we give is the advice we would give ourselves.
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
The most common mistake we see
A business leader hears about a competitor using AI and immediately asks "how do we get AI?" The right question is "what problem do we need to solve?" Technology chosen before the problem is understood is almost always the wrong technology.
What makes us different
We are as likely to tell you to keep your money in your pocket as we are to propose a build. Not everyone needs AI. Not every problem is an AI problem. That honesty is rare in a space full of vendors with a commercial interest in you buying something.
What we actually do
A focused set of services built around the problems SMEs actually face — not a catalogue designed to maximise billing.
- GenAI advisory
- What you need to implement GenAI, whether it will work for your use case, and what the pitfalls are. We help you navigate the landscape and find the best solution — or tell you to wait.
- Vendor management
- Prefer an existing vendor? We audit suitability and manage the process. Want a bespoke coded solution? We can do that too. Either way, we are on your side of the table.
- Machine learning
- Classical ML models for regression, classification, and clustering tasks. Compute-light, interpretable, and often the right tool when a large language model would be a sledgehammer.
- NLP and speech recognition
- Chatbots, virtual assistants, sentiment analysis, language translation, and document processing. We design systems that understand your users in the language they actually use.
- App integration
- Connecting AI solutions to your existing applications. We always look at off-the-shelf APIs first to save you time and money, and only build custom integrations when they are genuinely necessary.
- Deployment and maintenance
- Defining the tech stack best matched to your security needs, then assisting with deployment and ongoing maintenance. Self-hosting options available for strict data sovereignty requirements.
What we won't do — and why that matters
Knowing what you are not good at is as important as knowing what you are. We would rather lose an engagement than deliver something below the standard our clients deserve.
Large enterprise solutions
We do not have the headcount, infrastructure, or the desire. If you need a 50-person delivery team or a global rollout, we will help you find the right partner — but we won't be that partner.
Large self-hosted deployments
We are not infrastructure architects. Designing and maintaining large on-premise AI deployments is a specialism of its own. We can advise, but we won't implement at that scale.
Cutting-edge AI research
CUDA clusters, tensor computation, inference engines, KV-cache systems, JEPA, LSPMs — not our bag. If you need a team of PhD researchers, we are absolutely not the company for you.
How a typical engagement works
Every project is different but the underlying approach is always the same. We do not arrive with a solution already in mind.
- 01
Understand
We start with your business problem, not the technology. We ask the uncomfortable questions, map your data landscape, and establish whether AI is even the right tool before a line of code is written.
- 02
Design
We map the simplest possible solution path, evaluate build versus buy, and stress-test the design against your team's actual technical capability. No over-engineering. No unnecessary infrastructure.
- 03
Implement
We build, test, iterate with your staff, and hand over without lock-in. The system should be understandable and maintainable by your team — not a black box that only we can service.