AI Development & Strategy Consulting

Practical AI, without the hype

Every business is being told it needs an AI strategy. Few are told what that actually means for their systems, their data, and their budget. At Hokstad Consulting, we help companies across the UK and beyond cut through the noise: we identify where AI genuinely pays off in your business, and we build it — pragmatically, incrementally, and with a clear view of costs and returns.

We are senior engineers first. We won't sell you a transformation programme you don't need; we'll help you ship AI capabilities that work, whether that's a first LLM integration or a bespoke AI-powered product.

What we do

• AI strategy & feasibility — assess where AI creates real value in your operations, and just as importantly, where it doesn't. You get a grounded, prioritised roadmap rather than slideware.
• LLM integration & development — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), document processing, support automation, internal copilots and AI-assisted workflows, integrated with your existing systems.
• Custom AI tooling — bespoke tools and agents built around your data and processes, with the same engineering discipline we bring to all our custom development work.
• AI cost engineering — model selection, caching, batching and self-hosting options that keep inference costs predictable. Our cloud cost expertise applies directly: AI workloads are infrastructure too.
• Team enablement — helping your developers adopt AI-assisted workflows effectively, from tooling choices to review practices.

How we work

We favour small, verifiable steps: a focused assessment, a prototype against your real data, then production hardening — with security, privacy and compliance considerations addressed from the start, including where your data does and doesn't go.

Engagements are flexible — hourly, fixed-scope projects, or ongoing retainers — and we are vendor-neutral: we recommend the models and platforms that fit your constraints, whether that's hosted APIs or self-hosted open models on infrastructure we help you run.

We build AI products ourselves

We don't just advise. We build and run our own AI-powered products on our own ACT platform — including RubyCoder, an aggregator for information on AI development using Ruby, and All The News, which collects and summarises news from across the federated web. The same engineering we put into these products is what we bring to client work.

Is this you?

• You suspect AI could remove real bottlenecks, but want evidence before investing
• You've tried off-the-shelf AI tools and hit their limits
• You need AI features built into an existing product, not a science project
• You want senior engineers who will tell you honestly when AI is not the answer

Schedule a 30 minutes, no-obligation call today — no pressure, no obligation. Just a clear, practical conversation about what AI can and can't do for your business.