Document intelligence
Reading invoices, delivery notes, LPOs, contracts, claim forms, title deeds, KYC packs and handwritten records into structured, validated data — including phone photographs taken in bad light.
Service · Engineering
Off-the-shelf AI is excellent right up to the moment your problem gets specific. When the value lives in your own documents, your own history and your own oddly-shaped process, you need something built — properly, and handed over so you own it.
What is custom AI development?
Custom AI development is building an artificial intelligence system specific to one organisation’s data, processes and constraints, rather than configuring a general-purpose product. It typically combines existing foundation models with your own data through retrieval, fine-tuning or structured extraction, wraps them in application logic and integrations, and deploys the result into production with monitoring, evaluation and human oversight.
We are not in the business of training models from scratch — almost nobody should be, and anyone in Kenya offering to do so for a mid-sized business is selling you an expensive science project. The work is in connecting excellent existing models to your specific reality, and in the unglamorous engineering that makes the result trustworthy: validation, evaluation, logging, permissions and rollback.
The other half of the job is integration. Kenyan businesses run on a mix of modern SaaS, legacy on-premise systems, spreadsheets, and one critical application whose original developer is unreachable. We have made peace with this. Most projects involve at least one system with no documentation.
Signs you need this
In practice
All of these are things we have designed for Kenyan operating conditions — patchy connectivity, mixed-quality documents, and systems that were never meant to be integrated.
Reading invoices, delivery notes, LPOs, contracts, claim forms, title deeds, KYC packs and handwritten records into structured, validated data — including phone photographs taken in bad light.
An assistant that answers from your own policy manuals, tender library, product specifications or case files, cites its sources, and respects who is allowed to see what.
Demand, stock, cash flow and staffing forecasts built on your own history, with seasonality that reflects Kenyan reality — school terms, harvest cycles, Ramadan, December, election periods.
Quality inspection on a production line, shelf and planogram checks in retail, damage assessment for insurance claims, and proof-of-delivery verification from driver photographs.
The connective tissue: M-Pesa Daraja, KRA eTIMS, ERP and accounting systems, CRMs, SMS gateways, and the in-house system nobody has documentation for.
If you sell software, we add the AI features your customers are asking for — search, summarisation, drafting, classification — without you rebuilding your team around it.
The same answer, two ways
How a custom AI system gets built and kept alive
We connect a very capable general-purpose brain to your specific information, and put guard rails around it.
The clever part — the model that understands language or images — already exists and is very good. What it does not have is any knowledge of your business. So the job is teaching it, safely, about your documents, your products, your customers and your rules.
We start small and real. Give us fifty of your actual invoices, or a hundred of your actual support questions, and we build something that handles those. Then we test it against cases it has not seen, count how often it is right, and show you the score honestly. If the score is not good enough to be useful, you find that out in week two for a small amount of money, not in month six for a large one.
Once it works, we wire it into your systems, add the checks that stop it doing anything silly, and put a person in the loop wherever a mistake would be expensive. Then we write it all down and hand you the keys — the code, the accounts, the documentation.
Afterwards, things change: providers update models, your products change, volumes grow. That is why we build a test set from your real cases. When anything changes, we can prove in minutes whether the system still does its job, instead of finding out from a customer.
Foundation models behind an application layer we own end to end: typed extraction, hybrid retrieval, deterministic validation, evaluation harness, observability.
Model strategy. Default to hosted frontier models via API for quality and operational simplicity; open-weight models on self-managed infrastructure where data residency, cost at volume or latency demands it. We benchmark two or three candidates against your own task before committing, and we keep the provider swappable behind an internal interface so a deprecation is a config change and a regression run, not a rewrite.
Retrieval. Document parsing with layout awareness, semantic chunking with overlap tuned per corpus, embeddings in pgvector or a managed index, hybrid BM25 plus dense retrieval, cross-encoder re-ranking, and metadata filters carrying row-level permissions so retrieval itself enforces access control rather than the prompt asking nicely.
Extraction. Structured outputs constrained to a JSON schema, with per-field confidence and deterministic post-validators: arithmetic, checksums, referential integrity against master data, date plausibility. Anything failing validation routes to human review with the original document rendered alongside the proposed values.
Forecasting. Gradient-boosted trees or classical statistical models first — they are usually more accurate, far cheaper and much easier to explain than a deep model on the data volumes most Kenyan businesses actually have. Backtested on rolling origin with honest error bars.
Evaluation. A golden set from real historical cases with expected outputs; task-appropriate metrics; LLM-as-judge only where it correlates with human scoring on a validated sample. Runs in CI on every prompt, model or retrieval change.
Delivery. Your repository, your cloud account, infrastructure as code, secrets in a managed vault, structured logging with trace IDs across the whole call chain, dashboards and alerting, and a documented rollback. Handover includes an architecture decision record explaining why each significant choice was made — including the compromises.
The shape of most systems we build. Yours will be a subset — we resist adding components that do not earn their maintenance cost.
What you get
A production system and everything needed to run it without us.
Typical engagement
Every quote is fixed before work starts. If we scoped it wrong, that is our risk, not yours. See how pricing works.
Typical stack
We choose tools your team can maintain, not the ones that make us look clever.
Questions
Buy off the shelf when your problem is a common one and your process can bend to fit the product — email, scheduling, transcription, generic customer support. Build custom when the value is in your own data or your own process: answering questions from your specific document library, forecasting demand for your specific products, reading your specific paperwork, or connecting systems that no vendor has ever heard of. As a rule of thumb, if a competitor could use the same product with the same settings, buy it.
Retrieval-augmented generation is how you make an AI answer questions about your information rather than the general internet. Your documents are indexed; when someone asks a question, the system first finds the most relevant passages and then asks the model to answer using only those passages, citing them. It is how you get an assistant that knows your HR policy, your tender history or your product manuals without retraining a model and without it inventing answers.
You decide, and we make the choice explicit rather than burying it. With the major commercial API providers, business and enterprise tiers do not train on your data by default — but that is a contractual position we check for your specific plan, in writing, rather than assume. Where data cannot leave the country or your building, we deploy open-weight models on infrastructure you control. That costs more and performs somewhat below the frontier models, and we will show you the trade-off with real numbers so you can decide.
Always. Code, prompts, evaluation sets, infrastructure definitions and documentation live in your repository under your account from the first commit, not ours. You can dismiss us at any point and another team can pick it up. We think being replaceable is a feature — it is the only honest way to earn a renewal.
Three things. An evaluation set built from your real cases with expected outputs, so any change can be regression-tested before it ships. Production monitoring on accuracy proxies, escalation rates and cost. And a documented rollback path, because models get deprecated and providers change behaviour with little notice. The evaluation set is the durable asset here — models will be swapped several times over a system’s life; the tests that prove it still works are what you keep.
Yes, and we prefer it. The best outcome is that your team can maintain and extend what we built. We pair with in-house developers, review their code, run knowledge-transfer sessions, and write documentation aimed at whoever inherits this in two years — including the parts we are least proud of and why they are that way.
Keep exploring
Most clients combine two or three of these.
We find the repetitive work eating your team's week — reconciliation, data entry, approvals, reporting — and hand it to software that never gets tired.
A WhatsApp and website assistant that answers customers in English and Kiswahili, qualifies leads, checks order status and escalates to a human when it should.
An honest map of where AI will make you money, where it will waste your money, and what to do first — costed, sequenced and tied to your numbers.
Start here
Book a free 30-minute call. We will map one process end to end, tell you honestly whether AI is the right answer, and put a number on what fixing it is worth. No slide deck, no jargon.
Nairobi-based · We reply the same working day · English & Kiswahili
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