Manchester sends us a different sort of problem than London does. It is rarely a regulator asking how a decision was made; it is a catalogue of two hundred thousand products that nobody can search properly, a support queue that grows faster than headcount, or thirty years of broadcast material sitting on a shelf that is technically digitised and practically unreachable.
Manchester and the surrounding towns hold one of the densest concentrations of online retail in Europe, a national broadcast cluster at Salford, a growing health technology corridor around the universities and the hospitals, and the professional services firms that serve all three. The AI problems that arrive from them are mostly volume problems: too many products, too many tickets, too many hours of footage.
Retail and marketplace businesses come to us because their search is losing them money. Someone types a phrase a merchandiser never anticipated, gets nine irrelevant results, and leaves. That is a retrieval and ranking problem long before it is a language-model problem, and we treat it as one — see merchandising and search. The same companies usually arrive with a second, quieter problem: a contact centre whose cost scales exactly with order volume, which is what customer service automation exists to break.
The media businesses around MediaCity have the opposite shape. Their archive is enormous, valuable, and effectively write-only, because finding the ninety seconds you remember means asking someone who was there. Transcription plus retrieval over the archive turns that into a search box. It is the least glamorous project in the building and reliably the one that pays for itself first.
Health technology companies here tend to be small teams with clinical advisers and a very clear sense of what they are not allowed to automate. That is a good starting position. The work is usually documentation and triage support with a clinician holding the decision, which is the pattern described under healthcare and life sciences.
No. We have one office and it is in Barcelona. We fly over for discovery, for handover and for anything where standing next to the problem changes what we learn. A studio our size claiming a Manchester address would be describing a registered-office service.
Yes, though the honest version is that it stays in a UK region rather than in Manchester — the providers run their UK capacity in and around London. Within that, storage, inference and logs can all be pinned to the UK, and open-weight models can run inside your own perimeter. Where a hosted model is involved we write down its retention and training terms at the time of writing, and you should check them against the provider's current terms before you sign.
The ICO. It has published guidance on AI and data protection for several years, and its concerns are consistent and unsurprising: a lawful basis for the processing, transparency about what is automated, accuracy, and a route for a person to contest a decision that affects them. We design so those are answerable. Your DPO owns whether the answers are sufficient.
It is the project. Roughly the first third of a retail engagement is usually spent on the data behind the search rather than on the model in front of it, because ranking cannot recover attributes that were never captured. We would rather say that in week one than discover it in week six.
Neither. Our ranges are published on the pricing page, in euros and exclusive of VAT, and they are the same wherever you are. We do not price by postcode.
Half an hour on the actual problem, and a straight answer on whether we are the right team for it.
30-minute technical call · no deck
What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
Brand, website, prototype, apps on five platforms, the AI backend and the algorithm-intelligence pipeline for Podswap, a social growth engine that runs without a human in the loop.
In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Apps, platforms and campaigns for these teams, long before the AI work. Every one is written up on the work page — what we did, and where our part ended.
