Production agents that ship and ship again

AI Agent Development

Autonomous agents that do real work inside your stack: read your systems, take scoped actions, escalate when confidence drops, and log every decision for audit.

What this is

Most agent projects die at the demo. They work on a laptop with a friendly prompt and a clean input, then fall apart the first time a customer sends a screenshot, a half finished sentence, or a request that touches billing. We build agents the way we build any other production service: scoped permissions, typed tool contracts, retries with backoff, structured logging, evaluation gates before each release, and a rollback path that a non engineer can trigger.

What is included

  • Tool calling agents wired into your CRM, helpdesk, database, and internal APIs
  • Multi step planning with hard budget ceilings on tokens, time, and spend
  • Human in the loop approval gates on any action that moves money or data
  • Evaluation harness with golden datasets so a model swap never silently regresses
  • Full observability: traces, token cost per run, failure taxonomy, alerting

How we run it

  1. Scope the risky part

    We identify the single hardest judgement in the workflow and prototype that first. If the agent cannot do that reliably, nothing else matters.

  2. Build the tool layer

    Typed tools with validation, idempotency keys, and least privilege credentials. The agent only reaches what it needs.

  3. Wire evals

    Golden cases from your real history, scored automatically. No release ships without passing the gate.

  4. Ship behind a gate

    Shadow mode first, then human approval, then narrow autonomy on the cases the data says are safe.

  5. Operate and widen

    Weekly review of failures, expanded autonomy where evidence supports it, tightened rails where it does not.

What you receive

  • Agent service deployed to your infrastructure or ours
  • Tool layer with typed schemas and input validation
  • Eval suite plus a regression gate wired into CI
  • Operator console for approvals, replays, and manual overrides
  • Runbook covering failure modes, escalation, and rollback
Engagement
  • Typical duration4 to 8 weeks
  • Indicative investmentFrom $8,500
  • CategoryAutomate
  • Starts withFree written quote
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Typical stack
ClaudeOpenAILangGraphTemporalPostgresRRedisDDocker

Third party names and logos are shown for identification only and do not imply affiliation or endorsement.

Month one is refundable. If the first month does not land we return it. We would rather refund than carry a project neither side believes in.

The return

What this gives back, every month

Ranges, not promises. They come from published 2026 automation benchmarks and our own delivery data, and the audit re-runs them against your actual volumes before you commit anything.

90 to 160hours a monthrecovered across support triage, CRM updates, and lead routing
$3,400 to $6,100Staff time returned every month
8 to 12 weeksTime to break even
$8,500Your first year cost, all in

Why buy it

The case for doing this now

You are already paying for this work

The hours do not disappear when you ignore them. A team of six spending two hours a day each on triage and data entry is carrying roughly $57,000 a year in salary against work no human enjoys.

Volume grows faster than headcount

Ticket and lead volume scales with revenue. Headcount scales with hiring cycles and budget approval. An agent absorbs the gap without a job posting.

The alternative costs forty times more

A fully loaded senior AI engineer in the US runs $300,000 to $460,000 a year. This engagement is a single build fee, and you own the code afterwards.

Compared to the alternatives

What the same outcome costs elsewhere

Every option below solves some version of this problem. Here is what each one actually costs over twelve months.

First year total cost, including the staff time you keep paying if nothing changes
Do nothing for a year
$57,000
Hire in-house
$300,000
Typical agency
$35,000
deepaibots
$8,500

Figures are indicative market ranges for a team of 10 to 60 staff, not quotes from named vendors. Staff time is costed at $38 an hour loaded, meaning salary plus employment cost plus overhead.

Your optionsUpfrontOngoingTime to valueWhat you get
Do nothingNone$4,750/mo in staff timeNeverThe work continues, the cost compounds
Hire an AI engineerRecruiter fee$25,000 to $38,000/mo4 to 6 monthsFully loaded US cost, plus hiring risk
Typical AI agency$20,000 to $50,000Retainer on top8 to 16 weeksOften subcontracted after the sales call
deepaibots$8,500Optional from $1,200/mo4 to 8 weeksNamed senior engineer, source transfers to you

What changed

Why this is worth buying in 2026 and was not in 2024

The scope of this service moved with the tooling. These are the shifts that make the engagement materially better than the same brief eighteen months ago.

  • 01

    Native tool calling is now reliable enough for production. Two years ago agents needed brittle output parsing; today the model returns typed structured calls your code validates directly.

  • 02

    Inference cost per million tokens has fallen far enough that per-run economics work at SMB volume, not just enterprise scale.

  • 03

    Evaluation harnesses became standard practice. A model swap is now a config change plus a scored regression run rather than a rebuild and a leap of faith.

FAQ

AI Agent Development: your questions

How autonomous will the agent be on day one?

Not very, deliberately. We launch in shadow mode where the agent drafts and a human approves. Autonomy expands per case type once the eval data supports it, usually within four to six weeks.

What if a model gets deprecated?

The tool layer and evals are model agnostic. Swapping providers is a config change plus a full eval run, typically under a day.

Who owns the code?

You do. Full source, infrastructure as code, and documentation transfer on final invoice.

Get a fixed price for ai agent development

The quote gives you a written scope and a fixed price. No obligation to proceed.