Steve&Nick’s

So much is talked about Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently that it can be difficult to assess if these technologies can be useful long term. We’ve been through various technology fads recently, navigating the hype can be overwhelming.

But Steve and Nick think AI is different and that’s because we feel the term AI is a bit of a misnomer. AI is, for all intents and purposes, clever data processing and pattern recognition. We are not techbros, we do not evangelise, we have studied this science from an academic point of view and we approach its application with the same pragmatism. Now we want to help you to understand if leveraging these technologies can help your business and bring your ideas to life.

If you feel you might be missing out on the benefits of AI because you don’t have the in-house skills or maybe you have an idea but you don’t know where to start then we can help. We are a cost effective solution for discovery, prototyping and implementation. We will tell you honestly if we don’t think it’s worth your investment right now, otherwise we will give you a range of options and if you like, build you a prototype.

If the prototype works and you feel it will improve your product, service or bottom line then we can scale it and integrate it. We’re happy to work with your in-house technology teams or on our own - it’s what we’ve been doing for more than two decades as IT professionals.

As a technical project manager/creative technologist, Nick has been involved in more scoping workshops than he cares to remember. The workshop is for you to talk about your business or organisational challenges and for us to listen for opportunities to apply AI. We can talk you through how other companies with similar challenges benefited and how to navigate the pitfalls that the world is only just waking up to (rogue chatbots, intellectual property infringement, security etc).

We can look at your product or service provision. Are there new business opportunities you have not yet considered? We can discuss how you interact with potential and existing customers. Can you reach out to more people? What are the risks and benefits of employing a virtual person to do so? What data do you generate? Can we use it to make a predictive model to help you make better decisions?

Following the workshop we’ll write you a report featuring all the potential applications of AI with a cost benefit analysis for each one - including top level cost estimates for prototype and production and our opinion of how beneficial for the investment each would be. We’ll also cover the possible risks of implementing or not implementing each approach - we will consider what might happen if your competition gains advantage through AI.

If there are some ideas in the report we all feel are worth your investment we can make a proof of concept prototype. We know the right tools and environments to make prototypes quickly. We know how to keep your data secure and we’re always OK with signing NDAs. We’ve been coding all our lives and professionally for 25 years. We’ll be clear in our approach through specification documentation and we’ll be mindful of integration into any existing systems should the prototype need to be scaled. Before we start we’ll all agree what success looks like.

How the prototype evolves and integrates into your business very much depends on what the functionality is. If, for example, it’s a virtual assistant for your website we can work with your existing team to get that integrated, this is the type of collaborative work we’re used to. Say you sell garden flowers and we’ve built you an app t hat can help your customers visually identify problems with the plants and how to fix them, we can help manage the deployment of your app to the main app stores - including all the approval processes.