Us against a boutique AI consultancy, answered in full.

A build shop delivers working AI software. A transformation consultancy changes how the organisation operates so that software is actually adopted: redefining roles, moving decision rights, rewriting governance and managing the resistance that follows. Most failed agentic programmes have working technology and an unchanged organisation.

Ask for named clients with checkable outcomes, not anonymised logos. Ask who specifically will be in the room and what they personally delivered. Ask what happened after they left the last three engagements. Ask whether they will publish a price. Ask what they would decline to do. Firms that cannot answer those five questions concretely are usually selling capacity rather than capability.

Because agentic transformation is a change programme with AI in it. The hard parts (moving decision rights, redesigning roles, managing incentive conflict, sustaining adoption past the initial enthusiasm) are the same problems delivery transformation has always faced. A firm that has never made ten thousand people work differently will meet those problems for the first time on your programme.

No. For a narrowly scoped technical build, a specialist shop will usually be cheaper and often better. Tenhaw is priced for organisation-level change where the operating model, the engineering and the adoption all have to move together.

Six come up repeatedly, and they are different shapes rather than six versions of the same firm. Faculty, in London, works across sectors including defence, national security, health and financial services and runs a fellowship programme alongside its services. Mind Foundry, in Oxford, is a university spinout founded by Oxford machine learning professors and now leads with machine learning for defence and national security behind named products. Aiimi, in Milton Keynes, sells its own platform alongside services and leads with enterprise data, search and governance. Advancing Analytics, in London, is a partner-led data and AI engineering firm, an elite Databricks partner and a Microsoft advanced specialist. Kortical, in London, sells an AI platform and consulting together and describes building enterprise agents end to end on it. Datasparq describes itself as a UK data and AI consultancy covering strategy and implementation. Those descriptions come from each firm's own published material, and we make no claim about their quality. The three questions worth asking all seven of us in the same words are: which of your people will be in the room and what did they personally deliver, can we speak to a client running what you built in production, and what would you decline to do. Our own answer to the second one is no, not yet, and you should weigh that.

Who owns the thing at the end, and where the supplier's margin comes from. A firm selling its own platform has a commercial interest in your architecture running on it. That cuts both ways: part of what you buy keeps improving without you paying for it, and part of your estate is now theirs to version. Three of the six UK firms named on this page sell a platform or product of their own. Tenhaw does not sell a product, does not resell models, platforms or licences, and takes no margin on any of them, so no part of your run cost is revenue for us. The trade is that we have no compounding asset to amortise, which is one reason we are not the cheapest per day. Ask any supplier what you would be able to change a year after they leave, without them.