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AI consultingAn AI team you can rent.
Tabotec's consulting practice helps teams put AI into production — without the lock-in, the slide decks, or the two-year roadmap. Same engineers who build our products. Same opinionated, eval-driven approach. Pointed at your problem.
What we do
Six things teams keep hiring us for.
Engagements vary, but most fall into one of these buckets. Pick one, mix several — we'll scope to your reality, not the other way around.
AI strategy & architecture
Where AI actually buys you something in your product, where it doesn't, and what the technical shape of the solution should look like. Includes a written architecture you can build from.
Model selection & benchmarking
We run real evals against your tasks — frontier APIs vs. open-weight bases vs. fine-tunes — and give you numbers you can defend in a budget meeting.
RAG & agent pipelines
Retrieval, tool use, agent loops, and structured outputs — wired into your product. We've shipped this stack many times. We know where it breaks.
Custom model roadmaps
For teams sitting on proprietary data: which base, which technique, which eval, what it costs, and when fine-tuning beats prompting (and when it doesn't).
Self-hosted inference & MLOps
llama.cpp, vLLM, Triton, on-prem GPUs or your own cloud. We set up serving, monitoring, and the operational discipline to keep it running.
Second opinions in flight
Already mid-build with a different team? We come in for a focused review — what's solid, what's load-bearing wishful thinking, what to fix first.
How we engage
Three flavors of engagement.
Discovery sprint
1–2 weeks. Fixed scope, fixed price. Audit, architecture, model recommendation, written deliverable. Most teams start here.
- Stakeholder + codebase walkthroughs
- Eval-backed recommendations
- Written architecture & roadmap
Build engagement
4–12 weeks. We embed and ship. You get working code, evals, runbooks, and your team trained on the system we leave behind.
- Weekly demoable progress
- Code in your repo, not ours
- Handoff & pairing built in
Fractional AI lead
Ongoing. A senior Tabotec engineer in your standups, reviews, and architecture calls — typically a day or two a week.
- Hiring & team-building support
- Vendor & model decisions
- Capped, predictable monthly cost
How we work
Vendor-neutral. Eval-driven. Boring on purpose.
If the right answer for you is Anthropic's API, we'll wire it up. If it's a local Llama on your own GPUs, we'll do that. If it's a hybrid, we'll prove the tradeoffs with real evals before you commit budget.
We don't take work that doesn't ship. We don't sell magic. We don't bill for slide decks. Every engagement ends with something a future engineer can read, run, and change.
More about TabotecGood fit if…
When to hire us
- You're shipping AI into a product, not just exploring
- You want to own what you build, including the model
- You care about evals, latency, cost, and privacy — not just demos
- You'd rather have a small senior team than a big junior one
- Your data has constraints — domain, language, regulation, locality
Bad fit: pure research, pure prototyping with no production target, or "make my chatbot creative."
Get in touch
Tell us what you're building.
A few sentences is plenty. We'll reply within two business days with a real human's read on whether we can help — and if we can't, who might.