Everything we get asked, answered in full.
316 questions from across the site, grouped into 39 subjects. Every question below links to its answer, and each answer is the one that sits on the page it came from, word for word.
- questions, each answered in full rather than summarised
- 316
- groups, each a page of its own
- 39
- pages they are answered on, every one linked
- 49
Tenhaw is a London-based UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner that audits, builds and governs agentic transformation for large organisations. This page indexes every question answered anywhere on tenhaw.com, 316 of them across 49 pages, grouped into 39 subjects with a page of answers for each. Nothing here is a summary: each answer is the exact text from the page that owns it, and every group links back to that page for the context around it.
Six families, 39 groups, 316 answers
Buyer questions first, delivery detail last. Each group is a page carrying its own answers, and every question below is a link straight to the answer rather than to the group it sits in.
The firm
What Tenhaw is, where people start, how an engagement runs, what it costs, and what your risk function will ask for.
What Tenhaw is
14 questionsThe entity questions: what the company is, what it sells, who runs it, where it works, and which well-known names on this site are clients rather than places the founder has worked.
Answered on How we engage.
- What is Tenhaw?
- Is Tenhaw an AI consultancy or a delivery partner?
- We do not use the word agentic. What kind of firm is Tenhaw?
- What does an AI delivery partner actually do?
- What does Tenhaw actually do?
- How much does Tenhaw cost?
- Who runs Tenhaw?
- What is a forward-deployed operator?
- Is Tenhaw a software product?
- How is Tenhaw different from a large consultancy?
- What size of organisation does Tenhaw work with?
- Do you work with UK enterprises only?
- Where is Tenhaw based and where does it work?
- Are HSBC, Microsoft and Sky Tenhaw clients or the founder's previous employers?
Where to start
7 questionsThe state people are in when they get here: a stalled Copilot rollout, shadow AI across the business, five tools that do not talk to each other. What we would do first in each, and how a first engagement begins.
Answered on How we engage.
Staffing, cadence and exit
6 questionsHow an engagement is staffed, how often something is expected to reach production, what happens if it is not working, and what is left behind when we go.
Answered on How we engage.
Pricing and commercials
7 questionsPublished day rates, published engagement prices, and the comparisons that flatter us least. Every competitor figure is quoted from that supplier's own published card.
Answered on Pricing and rate card.
- What do Big Four consultants charge per day in the UK?
- Is Tenhaw cheaper than the Big Four?
- How much does an AI transformation consultancy cost in the UK?
- Are contractors cheaper than a consultancy for AI work?
- What does an agentic system cost to run after the build?
- Why publish your competitors' rates?
- Does a smaller team deliver faster than a large consultancy?
Security and assurance
11 questionsWhat procurement, legal and a second-line risk function ask before anyone signs, including the two limits we publish rather than leave you to discover at contract stage.
Answered on Security and assurance.
- Who will be on the engagement, and how are they screened?
- How does Tenhaw work inside our systems and handle our data?
- Where is our data processed, and can we require UK or EU data residency?
- Which sub-processors does Tenhaw use, and where are they located?
- What is Tenhaw's breach notification SLA?
- How is AI-generated code security checked before it ships?
- Which AI tools does Tenhaw use, and what do they do with our data?
- What is Tenhaw's contractual, insurance and liability position?
- What data does the Tenhaw website itself collect?
- What insurance does Tenhaw carry, and at what level?
- What security certifications does Tenhaw hold today?
What you can buy
The five priced rungs: the two fixed-price ways in, the two delivery teams, and oversight bought on its own.
The audit and the proof of concept
13 questionsThe two fixed-price ways in: what is in scope, what each costs, who turns up, and how each one ends.
Answered on Agent-Readiness Audit and Agentic Proof of Concept.
- What is an agent-readiness audit?
- How much does an AI readiness assessment cost in the UK?
- Should we start with the audit or a proof of concept?
- Who from Tenhaw actually does the work?
- Should we hire a Head of AI or run an audit first?
- Can the audit sort out the AI tools we have already bought?
- Can the audit be used as AI due diligence before an acquisition?
- What is an agentic proof of concept?
- How can a proof of concept take only two weeks?
- Will our own engineers learn anything, or do you hand over a black box?
- What does an agentic proof of concept cost?
- Can we contract your engineers by the day instead?
- What happens if the proof of concept fails?
The design pair and the build team
11 questionsThe two monthly delivery rungs: a pair designing the operating model and the agentic architecture, and a team of three building inside your estate under partner oversight.
Answered on Agentic Design Team and Agentic Build Team.
- What is an AI-native operating model?
- Why design the operating model and the infrastructure together?
- Do you provide an interim Head of AI?
- Why a team of two rather than one?
- How do you decide what humans own versus what agents own?
- Who is actually on an agentic build team?
- What is an interim agentic lead?
- Can we take the agentic lead on their own, without the rest of the team?
- How often does the team deliver something?
- What stops us becoming dependent on Tenhaw?
- How much does an agentic build team cost?
Programme and delivery management
7 questionsOversight bought on its own, with no requirement that Tenhaw builds any of the programme, including programmes another supplier is building.
Answered on Programme & Delivery Management.
- Will Tenhaw manage a programme it is not building?
- Can you supply an AI programme manager without building anything?
- Can I hire a fractional AI delivery lead?
- How do you avoid a conflict of interest when you are also a supplier?
- What does programme management for an AI transformation cost?
- Why does an agentic consultancy offer programme management?
- Can you take over a programme that is already in trouble?
Your sector
Where the regime, the procurement route or the operation decides the order of the work.
Financial services regulation
7 questionsConsumer Duty, SS1/23, DORA, Solvency II and SM&CR, applied to decisions an agent makes rather than to the model that makes them.
Answered on Financial Services.
- How do banks govern AI agent decisions?
- Does Consumer Duty apply to decisions made by AI agents?
- What does the FCA expect when an AI agent makes a customer-facing decision?
- How does SS1/23 apply to agentic systems?
- Does DORA cover AI suppliers?
- What does Solvency II require of AI in underwriting?
- How does SM&CR affect AI agent deployment?
Agents in banking and insurance
9 questionsWhere an agent can and cannot be put to work in a regulated firm: onboarding, monitoring, claims, credit, complaints and underwriting triage.
Answered on Financial Services.
- Do you work with insurers, or only banks?
- Where should a bank start with agentic AI?
- Has Tenhaw delivered AI in a regulated bank?
- Can AI agents do KYC and customer onboarding?
- Where do AI agents help with anti-money-laundering and transaction monitoring?
- Can an AI agent handle an insurance claim?
- Can AI agents make credit decisions?
- Can agents handle complaints, and what does Consumer Duty require?
- How does AI help with underwriting submission triage?
The public sector
7 questionsWhere procurement rules and public accountability set the shape of the work before anyone opens a technical question.
Answered on Public Sector and Government.
- Does Tenhaw work with the public sector?
- What does the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard require of an AI supplier?
- Can a government department let an AI agent decide a case?
- How is agentic AI bought in UK government?
- Did Cabinet Office spend controls end, and what replaced them for AI projects?
- What should a department ask an agentic AI supplier to evidence?
- Has Tenhaw delivered an AI system inside a government department?
Retail, industry and energy
12 questionsThe questions asked where the work sits in operations, the supply chain and the estate rather than inside a regulated process.
Answered on Retail, Consumer and Media and Industrial, Energy and Infrastructure.
- Where do retailers get the fastest return from AI agents?
- Does UK consumer law apply to product descriptions written by AI?
- Do we need a DPIA for an AI agent that uses customer data?
- Who owns the rights to content generated by an AI model?
- How do you run an AI programme around peak trading?
- What is different about frontline versus head office AI adoption?
- Where do industrial businesses get value from AI agents?
- Can an AI agent be part of a safety case?
- Does NIS2 apply to AI systems in industrial operations?
- What do ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI RMF actually require?
- How do you run agentic transformation across distributed engineering teams?
- Has Tenhaw worked in heavy industry?
The alternatives
Other suppliers, hiring your own people, or running it internally. Each comparison names the case where the alternative wins.
Us against the Big Four
9 questionsA global consultancy against a firm this size, on price, pace and what a fixed-price audit actually buys, including the engagements where they are the right buy and we say so on the page.
Answered on Tenhaw vs Big Four.
- Should we hire a Big Four consultancy or a boutique for AI transformation?
- Why is Tenhaw cheaper than a Big Four audit?
- Can Tenhaw work alongside an incumbent Big Four supplier?
- What can a Big Four firm do that Tenhaw cannot?
- How do we justify a boutique to our board?
- Can Tenhaw give us a reference client running an agentic system in production?
- Do the Big Four deliberately drag work out?
- Does a smaller team really finish sooner?
- You publish day rates. Does the same criticism apply to you?
Us against a boutique AI consultancy
6 questionsThe nearest comparison we have, and the one where the differences are narrowest. Stated as they are rather than as we would like them.
Answered on Tenhaw vs AI boutiques.
- What makes an AI transformation consultancy different from an AI build shop?
- How do we evaluate an AI consultancy?
- Why does prior non-AI transformation experience matter?
- Is Tenhaw the cheapest option?
- Which UK AI consultancies should we shortlist alongside Tenhaw?
- What is the difference between an AI product company and an AI consultancy?
Offshore delivery partners
6 questionsWhere an offshore model is the cheaper answer and where the coordination cost eats the saving, with the case for them stated on the page rather than around it.
Answered on Tenhaw vs Offshore partners.
- Should we use an offshore or nearshore delivery partner for agentic AI?
- Is offshore development cheaper for AI work?
- What is the difference between offshore and nearshore for AI delivery?
- What does offshore delivery struggle with on an agentic programme?
- Can we use an offshore partner and Tenhaw at the same time?
- Does our data have to leave the UK if we go offshore?
Hiring contractors instead
6 questionsDay rate against day rate, and what a contractor market gives you that a firm does not, including the situations where hiring contractors is the better answer.
Answered on Tenhaw vs Contractors.
- Should we hire AI contractors directly or use a consultancy?
- Are contractors cheaper than an AI consultancy?
- How many contractors do we need to replace a consultancy team?
- What goes wrong when you staff an agentic programme with contractors?
- Can Tenhaw work alongside contractors we already have?
- Does buying a service instead of hiring contractors change our off-payroll position?
Building the team in-house
8 questionsThe permanent hire, honestly compared: what it costs, how long it takes to stand up, and why it is the right answer more often than a supplier will tell you.
Answered on Tenhaw vs Hiring in-house.
- Should we hire a Chief AI Officer or use an interim?
- How long does it take to hire an AI transformation leader in the UK?
- What does a Chief AI Officer cost in the UK?
- Will Tenhaw help us hire our permanent team?
- What if we hire someone and they leave?
- What roles do we need to hire for an agentic AI programme?
- What is the difference between an AI engineer, an ML engineer and a data scientist?
- Do we need to hire a prompt engineer?
Running it with an internal AI taskforce
4 questionsDoing it with the people you already have: what an internal taskforce is good at, and what it tends to run into.
Answered on Tenhaw vs Internal taskforce.
The programmes people are running
The agentic patterns enterprises are attempting now, and where each one stalls.
Document and voice intelligence
9 questionsTurning documents and conversations into something a business can act on: what each pattern is, what it takes to stand one up, and where it stalls.
Answered on Document intelligence to business intelligence and Voice agents and conversation intelligence.
- How long does a document intelligence proof of concept take?
- Why do document extraction projects stall after the demo?
- Our document AI proof of concept worked and never shipped. What now?
- What accuracy is good enough for document intelligence?
- Do we need to fix our data platform before doing this?
- What is conversation intelligence?
- Can we use our existing call recordings to train or run AI analysis?
- What makes real-time voice agents hard?
- Has Tenhaw delivered voice AI?
End-to-end agentic workflow
7 questionsHanding a whole process to agents rather than a single step: what changes, what has to be decided first, and where these programmes stop.
Answered on End-to-end agentic workflow implementation.
- What technology stack does Tenhaw build agentic systems on?
- Do we need Kubernetes, Terraform or Airflow to run agents?
- What is an end-to-end agentic workflow?
- How do you scale AI agents across an enterprise?
- Why doesn't AI assistance reduce our cycle times?
- Where do end-to-end agentic implementations usually fail?
- How do you decide which decisions agents can take?
Retrieval and knowledge access
7 questionsGetting an agent to the right document without getting it to the wrong one, and keeping permissions intact on the way.
Answered on Retrieval, RAG and permission-aware knowledge access.
- What is retrieval-augmented generation?
- Do we need a vector database?
- How do we stop RAG answering from documents a user is not allowed to see?
- How do you measure whether retrieval is working?
- Why does our RAG assistant give confident wrong answers?
- Does a bigger context window remove the need for retrieval?
- What does a retrieval system cost to run?
Retrieval, fine-tuning or prompting
6 questionsWhich of the three a problem actually needs, what each costs to run, and the cases where the cheapest option is the right one.
Answered on RAG, fine-tuning or prompting: how to choose.
Tools and system integration
10 questionsWhat an agent is allowed to call, and how it is wired to the systems it acts on.
Answered on MCP, tool calling and integrating agents with your systems.
- What is the Model Context Protocol?
- Do we need MCP, or is plain function calling enough?
- What is the biggest security risk when an agent can call our systems?
- How do you stop an agent taking an action it cannot undo?
- How many tools should one agent have?
- How do you know what an agent actually did?
- What does a tool-calling agent cost per run, and how slow is it?
- How do you connect an agent to Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Snowflake, Databricks or Workday?
- What is the difference between delegated and application permissions when an agent reads SharePoint?
- Should we use LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen or Semantic Kernel?
Agent identity and access
7 questionsWho an agent is when it acts, what it is entitled to reach, and how that is evidenced afterwards.
Answered on Agent identity and access.
- Should AI agents have their own identities?
- How do you stop AI retrieval leaking documents to the wrong users?
- What breaks when you go from one agent to thirty?
- What is non-human identity governance?
- How do you run an AI pilot without exposing customer data?
- When should the security team get involved in an agentic project?
- What is the first thing a CISO should ask about an agent deployment?
Guardrails and accuracy
7 questionsHallucination control, guardrails and the accuracy an agent has to hold before anyone lets it near a customer.
Answered on Guardrails, hallucination and accuracy control.
Agent evaluation and assurance
8 questionsHow an agent is evaluated before it goes live and monitored once it is, and what that evidence has to look like.
Answered on Agent evaluation and assurance.
- Why do AI pilots never reach production?
- What do we do when a pilot succeeded and then went nowhere?
- What is trajectory evaluation for AI agents?
- Should a consultancy be willing to recommend against its own release?
- What do you measure when there is no ground truth?
- Who should own AI agent evaluation?
- What should we measure after an agent is live?
- What does an evaluation harness for an agent actually consist of?
The business case
8 questionsWhat an agentic programme is worth in currency, how the number is built, and which parts of it a finance function will refuse.
Answered on The business case for an agentic programme: ROI, payback and what to measure.
- What is the ROI of an agentic AI programme?
- How do you build a business case for AI agents?
- What is the payback period on an agentic proof of concept?
- What does it cost to run an agentic system once it is built?
- Should we count hours saved as savings?
- How do you stop the business case being over-optimistic?
- What should finance measure after go-live?
- Who should own benefits realisation?
Governance and regulatory evidence
5 questionsThe evidence a governance function, an auditor or a regulator will ask for, specified while you build rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Answered on AI governance and regulatory evidence.
How we deliver
The operating model our engagements install, the engineering method underneath it, and the practices that run a quarter.
The Tenhaw Way
8 questionsThe operating model our engagements install, published in full so a team can adopt it without hiring us.
Answered on The Tenhaw Way.
- What is The Tenhaw Way?
- How is The Tenhaw Way different from Scrum or SAFe?
- Why price outcomes in currency?
- What are the levels of work in The Tenhaw Way?
- Why is a roadmap exactly one quarter?
- What is the difference between an AI-augmented and an AI-native team?
- Do I need to hire Tenhaw to use The Tenhaw Way?
- Where does AI fit in The Tenhaw Way?
Building with AI
9 questionsThe engineering method underneath the operating model: how we use AI to build, and what we hold to when we do.
Answered on Building with AI.
- Does the method work on an existing system, or only greenfield?
- What does AI-engineering-first mean?
- How long does it take to build a product this way?
- Why convert requirements to markdown first?
- What is the single highest-value step?
- How do you stop AI-generated code accumulating security problems?
- How do you stop this creating a dependency on the person who built it?
- Does this replace engineers?
- How do you keep AI-generated code maintainable?
The AI-native delivery lifecycle
7 questionsWhat changes in the way software is specified, reviewed and shipped once agents are doing part of the work.
Answered on AI-native SDLC and product delivery lifecycle.
- What is an AI-native SDLC?
- Why does AI coding tool adoption stall?
- Does AI-assisted development make code less maintainable?
- How do you handle engineers who resist AI-assisted development?
- If AI writes most of the code, how do you know it is safe?
- How do you turn a proof of concept into production software?
- How do you measure whether an AI-native SDLC is working?
Outcomes and roadmaps
8 questionsSetting an outcome worth having, and planning a quarter against it rather than against a list of features.
Answered on How to set an outcome and How to put together a quarterly roadmap.
- How do you price work with no revenue line, like compliance, security or platform?
- How precise does the price need to be?
- Can one epic contribute to two outcomes?
- What happens when the value does not land?
- What if an outcome needs longer than a quarter?
- How do I set a calibration factor before I have any history?
- Something urgent lands in week five. What do I do with it?
- Do the Tech Debt and Bug Budget epics carry a currency value?
Measuring value
4 questionsValidating that the outcome actually landed, in the currency the business uses rather than in story points.
Answered on How to measure value (outcome validation).
Epics and stories
12 questionsHow the work is described before anyone builds it, from a value-focused epic down to a story a team can finish.
Answered on How to write a value-focused epic, How to break an epic into stories and How to write a story.
- What if the epic has no revenue attached, like a compliance deadline or a platform migration?
- How precise does the value estimate need to be?
- Who writes the value, product or finance?
- Can two epics share one outcome's value if they only work together?
- How many stories should an epic have?
- Do stories carry a currency value?
- What do I do with a story nobody can size?
- Can I write stories before the epic is approved?
- Who writes the story, the product manager or the engineer?
- How small is too small?
- The epic is not product-approved yet. Can I write stories against it?
- Do we still need the As a user, I want, so that template?
Discovery and chapters
8 questionsFinding out what is true before committing a quarter to it, and holding a body of work together while it is in flight.
Answered on How to do discovery research and How to write a chapter.
Forecasting and dates
8 questionsProbability rather than a promise: forecasting with confidence intervals, and what holding a date actually takes.
Answered on How to forecast with confidence intervals and How to manage delivery to be on time.
- How much history do I need before I can forecast?
- The team is brand new and has no throughput at all. What then?
- The business will not accept a range. What do I give them?
- Do I need a forecasting tool to do this?
- We have no clean history to forecast from. Where do we start?
- The business will not accept a range. They want one date.
- The date is fixed externally, by a regulator or a contract. What changes?
- How large a forecast movement is worth escalating?
Running delivery day to day
12 questionsThe week-to-week practice: managing product delivery, watching a release in production, and keeping the team well enough to do it again next quarter.
Answered on How to run live monitoring after a release, How to manage day-to-day product delivery and How to run a team health check.
- How long should the window be?
- Is this the same as being on call?
- What if the change is behind a flag or a percentage rollout?
- Who owns it, product or engineering?
- How long should this take each day?
- What if I cover three teams?
- An urgent customer request just came in. Does it beat the sequence?
- How is this different from stand-up?
- How is this different from a retrospective?
- Should the scores be anonymous?
- What if every card comes back green?
- Who runs it and who attends?
Bugs and root cause
8 questionsWhat happens when something is wrong: raising a bug somebody can act on, and finding the cause rather than the symptom.
Answered on How to raise a bug and How to run a root cause analysis.
- Is a missed requirement a bug?
- Do defects found before release count against the bug budget?
- Who sets severity, and can it be changed?
- What do we do when the bug budget runs out mid-quarter?
- How is an RCA different from live monitoring?
- Who should run the session?
- What if the cause sits with a supplier we do not control?
- Is this supposed to be blameless?
Risks and release notes
8 questionsWriting a risk somebody will act on, and a release note somebody will read.
Answered on How to write a risk or issue and How to write release notes.
- When a risk becomes an issue, do I raise a new item?
- How do I set a probability when I have no data?
- Our board wants a RAG status. Do we abandon that?
- How big should a RAID log be?
- Who writes the release notes, product or engineering?
- What if the change is invisible to customers?
- Can we auto-generate the notes from commit messages?
- Is this proportionate for a hotfix at 2am?
The questions above are the ones we have been asked enough times to write down. Anything specific to your estate, your regulator or your timeline is a conversation rather than a paragraph, and that is what the 30 minutes below is for. You can also read the case studies, each of which states its evidence basis on the page, or the five priced engagements.
Still have a question?
A 30-minute discovery call with James Rooney. Bring the question this page did not answer. You'll leave with a rough scope whether you engage us or not.
Most organisations start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks