Tenhaw, or someone else.

It depends on what you are buying, and any answer that names one firm without asking is selling something. If you need hundreds of people, multi-domain regulatory depth or a brand your board already accepts, the best buy is a global firm, whose published G-Cloud 14 rates run £2,050 to £3,625 a day at the top grades. If you need senior operators building working software inside your own teams, the best buy is a senior-led boutique, and five tests separate a good one from a brochure: named accountability on every engagement, published prices you can do arithmetic on, evidence labelled as production or proof of concept, a contractual exit with the capability transferred to your permanent team, and a security page that answers your CISO's questions in static prose. Tenhaw publishes all five, including the day rates (£950 to £1,560) every engagement price derives from, and the comparison pages on this site say when a global firm, contractors, an internal taskforce or an offshore partner is the better buy.

Ask four questions before any pitch deck opens. First, who exactly turns up, whether senior people who do the delivery themselves, under a no-substitution term, or a partner who sells and a pyramid that delivers. Second, what has actually reached production. Ask every candidate to label each case study as production, pilot or proof of concept, and watch what happens. Third, how the engagement ends: a contractual exit date, your own engineers upskilled by pair-programming, and everything deployed in your estate so nothing needs migrating when the supplier leaves. Supplier lock-in is designed out at the start or built in by default. Fourth, what the price derives from. Published day rates you can multiply (ours are £950 to £1,560, and Big Four rate cards top out at £2,600 to £2,855, from G-Cloud 14 and not yet re-verified against G-Cloud 15) beat a number that appears at the end of a sales process. Then send your security team the candidate's assurance page before the first call: screening, insurance in figures, breach notification in hours, data residency, and the toolchain that checks AI-generated code. A supplier who publishes those answers has decided to be checked. A supplier who sends a deck has decided not to be.

Read three clauses before you read the price. Ownership comes first, and with Tenhaw you own all code, documentation and work product from day one, not on final payment. Next, what a month has to produce. Engagements are retainer-shaped, every month carries a value target, and a month that delivers none is reported to you as a failed month. Then how it ends, with an exit date agreed at kickoff and 30 days' notice either way, in writing. Ask any supplier for each as drafted wording rather than an assurance, and where personal data is in scope, check the breach notification clock. Ours is 24 hours, as a term of the Data Processing Agreement.

Ask what the first paid engagement ends in. A firm that builds prices work that finishes in running software, a firm that advises prices work that finishes in a document, and both are honest buys. Three checks separate them: does the fixed price include working code, does that code land in your own repositories, and can you read their engineering standard before signing. Tenhaw is the worked example. The £44,000 audit runs four weeks and ends in working prototypes, a proof of concept is £20,000 to £55,000 fixed over two to four weeks, and the 72-rule standard behind both is open source. If your own engineers will do the building, a firm that only advises is the cheaper buy.

Three shapes of supplier serve that size and they solve different problems. Tenhaw works with organisations from 500 to 100,000-plus people, as a forward-deployed squad of three senior people rather than a pyramid, and James Rooney co-led the design of HSBC Global Payment Solutions' target operating model for 500 teams and a $450 million budget. A global consultancy is the better buy when hundreds of people have to mobilise across countries in a quarter, or when the programme also spans tax, legal or regulatory remediation under one contract. An offshore partner is the better buy once the specification is settled and volume is the constraint. At your size the deciding number is how many functions the first workflow crosses, not headcount.

Four categories bid for that work: global consultancies, systems integrators, specialist AI product firms, and small forward-deployed firms like Tenhaw. Ours is the narrow buy, with the operating model, the engineering and the adoption in one squad of three. The banking record behind it is the founder's, earned inside HSBC in an executive delivery governance role across 150-plus global teams and a $102 million budget, and in the co-design of Global Payment Solutions' target operating model for 500 teams. In a regulated insurer, a two-week proof of concept is being productionised now. What settles the rest is whether your first workflow touches a customer outcome, because that pulls your second line into the design from week one.

Two things decide a departmental shortlist, the delivery record inside government and which agreement you are buying through. Tenhaw was the portfolio manager for Tecknuovo, hands on as part of the contract, standing up a Portfolio Management Office from nothing and running it across 19 projects, including public-sector delivery for HMRC, the MOD and Thames Water. On the second, Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 went live on 30 January 2026 and every call-off runs through a further competition, so the route to market shapes the team before the technology does. Ask every bidder what their first paid engagement ends in, and whose repositories the code lands in.

Two shapes fit, and they are different buys. A specialist AI or data firm is better for a narrowly scoped model, demand forecasting or personalisation, where the operating model is not in question. Tenhaw is the other shape, with the operating model, the engineering and the adoption in one squad, sequenced so something lands inside a trading cycle rather than after it. A proof of concept is £20,000 to £55,000 fixed over two to four weeks, and the retail clients behind us are Greggs, YOOX NET-A-PORTER and Colart, delivery transformation rather than agentic build. Either way peak trading freezes roughly a quarter of the delivery year, and head office and frontline adoption are two different programmes.

Tenhaw runs engagements across the UK, Europe and the United States, and past delivery covers the UK, Australia, the USA and Singapore. At Yondr we made global delivery predictable across the UK, US and Singapore, which was delivery discipline rather than agents. The honest limit is shape. We field two or three senior people from a London base with no local office, so multi-country work means a UK team travelling and one time zone anchoring the decisions. If each country needs its own people permanently, a global firm or an offshore delivery partner does that and we cannot. The question underneath is whether this is one workflow with local policy variations or three separate builds.

Tenhaw's current agentic engagement is with a London specialty insurance business, confidential at the client's request, where a two-week proof of concept turned PDFs into business intelligence on Azure over ground the business had circled for roughly a year. It is a proof of concept being productionised rather than a production system. A global firm is the better buy where the programme also spans regulatory remediation or a carve-out under one contract. Your own shortlist turns on where a binding authority already draws the boundary of a decision, and on which function signs the output, since anything feeding technical provisions answers to the actuarial function as well as to a product owner.

Not too small, though often better served by something cheaper. Tenhaw's stated range starts at 500 people, and the published prices are a £44,000 fixed four-week audit and £70,000 to £85,000 a month for a build team of three, which is a serious line at that size. An internal taskforce or one contract engineer is frequently the better first move. Where we fit is when a single workflow is genuinely how you compete and nobody internal can direct the build. Smaller organisations also carry a real advantage in having fewer org charts a decision has to cross, which is usually what decides whether the change sticks.

Tenhaw's evidence in that sector is delivery rather than agents. We set up and ran the Data, Simulation and DevOps teams behind Anglo American's £40bn hydrogen business case, work that spun out as First Mode. What we do not do is write safety cases, and our default across the IT and OT boundary is read-only, with no write path your own OT security function has not designed. Where a transformation firm earns its place is engineering knowledge work, simulation and planning, and capital project reporting across distributed programmes. Your shortlist turns on whether the value sits in the analysis or in operational decisioning, because those need different suppliers.

Yes, and what matters is where the data sits and who contracts. Tenhaw LTD is registered in England and Wales, contracts from London and invoices in sterling, processes engagement data in the United Kingdom by default with EU residency available where your policy requires it, and carries 24-hour personal-data breach notification as a term of the Data Processing Agreement. What we build is deployed inside your own infrastructure under your policies. A firm with offices in each market is the better buy where a programme needs people permanently in country. Settle first which entity in the group signs the agreement, because that decides the residency answer rather than where the team sits.

Two categories, and Tenhaw is the second. Specialist AI product firms sell content and asset tooling, and transformation firms change how the teams around it work. Our media evidence is the founder's delivery roles at Sky and Discovery, including the visual rebrand team on the Discovery+ and Eurosport launch, one of six teams working to a date the CEO had already announced. The wedge that pays first here is content and asset production at volume, with customer service triage and summarisation behind it. Since 6 April 2025 the CMA has enforced consumer protection law directly, which reaches anything an agent writes for a customer, so the split that decides your shortlist is customer-facing output against internal work.

Ask for the shape of the engagement, not a solution, and be careful what you make scorable. Tenhaw sells a £44,000 four-week AI Readiness Audit precisely because nobody can know an agent's accuracy on your exceptions before building against your data, so an RFP demanding a guaranteed accuracy figure rewards the boldest guess rather than the best supplier. Score two things agentic work makes unusually revealing instead. One is the stopping condition each bidder will commit to, meaning the finding that would make them tell you not to proceed. The other is how they would sequence a second workflow once the first resets the estimate. Publish the weightings. What an RFP cannot settle is whether your exceptions are patterned, which only a build reveals.

Convert all three into a total for the same period, then list what each one leaves out. Tenhaw makes that arithmetic deliberately easy, because the audit is one fixed £44,000 for four weeks and the rungs above it are published as monthly bands, so a total is multiplication rather than interpretation. A day rate is not a cost until you also hold people-days by grade and a calendar, so require both from every bidder. A monthly fee needs a number of months behind it, and a fixed price means nothing until done is defined in writing. What no total captures is your own people's time, which varies more between these suppliers than the fees do.

Judge the reasoning, not the choice. Tenhaw's position is that the pick should not be made in a pitch at all, which is why the £44,000 four-week audit builds two or three candidate workflows as working prototypes against your real data inside your own tenancy, each with a measured accuracy read and an estimated run cost per workflow, and ranks them on that evidence. Until something like that exists, ask any bidder why that workflow, what its exception rate is today, whether the data is usable, who signs the output, and what finding would make them stop. A supplier who chose before seeing your volumes is describing someone else's business. Which workflow survives production volume is something only production settles.

Tenhaw makes the call easy by naming nine of the ten organisations behind its twelve case studies, so your own network can reach them without us in the middle. Ask any supplier's reference what cannot be scripted. Is it still running, who runs it now, what changed after the team left, what it cost to run in year two, how much of their own people's time it took, and was that engagement the team now proposed to you. Ask what each written study actually claims, too. Ours label a proof of concept as exactly that, including the agentic flagship being productionised inside a regulated insurer. What no reference settles is how their estate differs from yours.

Test the team, not the account. Tenhaw publishes its shape before any pitch, a forward-deployed squad of three made up of an Agentic Lead, an engineer and an adoption lead, with James Rooney personally accountable, at £70,000 to £85,000 a month. Ask your incumbent to bid the same fixed scope over the same weeks, and to say what agentic work the people it would put on this have actually shipped. Their knowledge of your estate is real value and should be weighed as such rather than discounted for being familiar. What the bids will not settle is whether estate knowledge or agentic experience matters more here, and that turns on how much of the first workflow is integration.

Ask for it, and treat reluctance as information. Tenhaw settles it by publishing every rung before you buy the first one: an Agentic Design Team at £35,000 to £55,000 a month, an Agentic Build Team at £70,000 to £85,000, and Programme and Delivery Management at £18,000 to £35,000, each on 30 days' notice either way with the exit date set at kickoff. The risk you are pricing against is real. A supplier finishes a small first piece holding all your context while your comparators have gone quiet, and that is the moment a follow-on gets quoted. Which rung you actually need is the part nobody can fix in advance, because the first piece decides it.