The firm, in the FAQ

Where to start, answered in full.

The 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.
questions in this group, each answered in full
25
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2
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25 questions on where to start, answered by Tenhaw, a UK AI consultancy and AI delivery partner based in London. 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.

On this page
7 questions

How we engage

Answered on How we engage, and rendered here in the same words.

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How do we start working with Tenhaw?

A 30-minute discovery call with James Rooney. You leave with a rough scope whether or not you engage Tenhaw. Most organisations then start with the fixed-price AI Readiness Audit, which is deliberately sold as standalone work with its own deliverable and no obligation to continue.

Why do most AI transformations fail?

Because the technology changes and the organisation does not. A pilot succeeds inside one team that has been given permission to work differently, then fails to scale because scaling requires redefining roles, moving decision rights and rewriting governance across functions the pilot team has no authority over. Adoption typically plateaus around 30%, the people who were always going to adopt, and more training does not move it, because awareness was never the constraint. That plateau is a pattern we have observed across the engagements we have run rather than a published statistic.

Our Copilot rollout stalled, what now?

Diagnose why before buying anything else. Stalled Microsoft 365 Copilot and Gemini rollouts usually fail on workflow, not licences. The assistant sits beside the work instead of inside it, so nothing measurable changes and the renewal gets hard to defend. The AI Readiness Audit traces the real workflows, prototypes two or three candidates against your own data, and hands your board a sequenced, costed plan. Four weeks, £44,000 fixed. A recommendation to stop is a valid outcome.

We have shadow AI across the business, where do we start?

With an inventory, because you cannot govern what nobody has counted. People reached for consumer tools because the sanctioned route was slower than the work, which normally makes shadow AI a symptom rather than a discipline problem. The AI Readiness Audit establishes what is genuinely in use across functions, which workflows depend on it and what data it touches, then separates what to sanction from what to stop and what to rebuild properly. Four weeks at a fixed price, with the constraints written up for your risk function.

How do we assess our AI maturity?

Not with a score out of five. A maturity model tells you where you sit against other organisations, which is interesting and rarely actionable. The AI Readiness Audit answers the question underneath it: which workflows AI could take, across the product, the internal processes, operations and the development process itself, what your data estate and risk appetite genuinely allow, where your workforce is ready and where it is not, and what to do first, second and third with costs attached. The output is a costed plan in three-month increments, capped at twelve months, rather than a maturity score.

We have bought five AI tools that do not talk to each other

That is tool sprawl, and usually a buying problem before it is an integration problem. Separate functions bought overlapping point solutions against separate business cases, a contact centre assistant here and a document tool there, with nobody owning the whole. The AI Readiness Audit maps what each tool was bought to do, where two of them cover the same job, and what each costs to run, then sequences what to keep, what to retire, and which workflow nothing you own currently covers. Vendor consolidation is an output of that, not the starting question.

What should AI due diligence cover?

Five things, in this order: what is genuinely in production against what is still a pilot, whether the claimed benefit is measured or asserted, what the systems cost to run at current volume, what data and model risk has been accepted and by whom, and whether the capability sits with named employees or with one supplier. Tenhaw runs this as an AI Readiness Audit scoped to the target or the business unit under review. It is an operational read, not legal or financial due diligence.

If the sources do not answer it, a call will.

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18 questions

Getting in touch

Answered on Getting in touch, and rendered here in the same words.

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What actually happens on the 30-minute discovery call?

You describe the problem, James Rooney asks questions, and you leave with a rough scope of what it would take, whether you engage Tenhaw or not. He leads every Tenhaw engagement personally, so the person scoping it on the call is the person who would run the work. Bring the messy version of the problem rather than a tidied deck. Nothing sits in front of the booking: no form, no qualification step, no sales desk. Thirty minutes buys a rough scope rather than an assessment, and the four-week, £44,000 AI Readiness Audit is the piece of work that does the assessment properly.

Who will we be dealing with at Tenhaw?

James Rooney, the founder, who leads every engagement personally. He reads hello@tenhaw.com rather than a sales desk, the phone reaches him or a voicemail that does, and the 30-minute call is with him. That is deliberate. The person who answers first contact is the person accountable for delivering the work, so what you are told on day one is said by someone who has to stand behind it. There is no switchboard and no gatekeeper in between. Engagements themselves run as two or three senior people, founder-led, with no junior pyramid underneath.

What should we prepare before a first call about an AI project?

Very little. Bring the messy version of the problem, because an unpolished account of what is slow, expensive or stuck is more useful than a slide deck, and the mess is where the value and the constraints actually sit. You do not need a business case, a requirements document, a shortlist of use cases or a budget figure. Getting from a messy description to a rough scope is what the thirty minutes is for. If something occurs to you before then, hello@tenhaw.com takes it, including the question you are not sure is worth a call.

What happens if Tenhaw is not the right fit for our problem?

You hear it on the first call, along with a pointer at someone who is a better fit. A rough scope is the promised output whether you engage Tenhaw or not, and sometimes the honest scope is that another firm, or no external firm, should do the work. That is a stated part of what the discovery call is for, not a reluctant concession. The same applies to geography. Forward-deployed work depends on being in your rooms and your decisions, so if the overlap cannot work for your location, that is said on the first call too.

Can we see examples of Tenhaw's work before describing our own?

Yes. There is a separate call for that, See how we did it, where a real engagement is walked through by the person who led it and the same method is then applied out loud to your situation. It covers published material only. The ways of working, published in full and free to adopt without hiring us. The target operating model James co-led at HSBC, designed and piloted for 500 teams, with global rollout due in 2026 and not yet rolled out. And the current build inside a London specialty insurer, anonymised to its market and labelled as what it is, a working proof of concept. You disclose nothing to book it.

Should we email, phone or book a call?

Pick by how formed the question is. Email hello@tenhaw.com for anything at all, including the one you are not sure is worth a call. Phone +44 7548 516643 when it is quicker said than written, or when it is urgent. Book the 30-minute call when you have a problem and want a rough scope of what it would take. If you are running a security or procurement review, none of those three is your route, so ask legal@tenhaw.com for the assurance pack, which arrives without a call. If none of them is obviously yours, take the call and we will route it from there.

What is in Tenhaw's supplier assurance pack?

The MSA, the SOW template, the DPA with its sub-processor annex, insurance certificates and completed security questionnaires. Request it at legal@tenhaw.com and it is sent the same week, usually the same day, with no call and no meeting required. It exists for security, procurement and third-party risk reviews, and the terms those reviews look for are already in the documents, which name 24-hour personal-data-breach notification as a DPA term and set UK data residency by default with EU available. If your supplier standard sets a higher insurance limit, name it and the cover is increased for that engagement, with the premium priced in.

Do we need to go through procurement before talking to Tenhaw?

No, and the two run in parallel. The discovery call asks nothing of your procurement function, and the assurance pack goes straight to your reviewers without a call, sent the same week you ask for it. Everything a supplier check needs early is public or a request away. Tenhaw LTD is registered in England and Wales, incorporated 10 July 2020, with the Companies House record linked from the contact page, and the contract and data protection documents are standing templates rather than things drafted per deal. Talk first and let the review catch up, or run the review first. Neither route blocks the other.

How quickly can an engagement start after the discovery call?

Usually as fast as your side can move, because nothing on ours has to be written from scratch. The rough scope comes out of the call itself, the MSA, SOW and DPA are already written and go out the same week you ask, and the engagements carry published fixed prices, the AI Readiness Audit at £44,000 for four weeks, so there is no proposal cycle to sit through before a start date is agreed. What normally sets the pace is supplier onboarding on your side, which is why the assurance pack ships without a call and your review can start the day after the conversation does.

Will contacting Tenhaw put us on a marketing list?

No. Correspondents are not added to a mailing list, and nothing on the contact page signs you up to one. What arrives when you write to hello@tenhaw.com is a reply from James, not a nurture sequence, and what happens to anything you send is set out in the privacy notice. There is no form, no gate, and no mechanism that records that you are evaluating Tenhaw before you have decided to say so yourself. The page is built to route rather than capture.

Can we skip the discovery call and just commission the audit?

Yes. The AI Readiness Audit is standalone work: £44,000 fixed, four weeks, ending in working prototypes, with no obligation to continue afterwards. Email hello@tenhaw.com with what you want looked at, and the SOW that follows sets the scope and the start date. What you give up by skipping the thirty minutes is the rough scope you would have left with, and that is the part worth having, since it is where the honest answer might be that a smaller proof of concept fits better, or that the work is not ours to take. Plenty of people book the call precisely to test that before spending anything.

Who should we bring to the discovery call?

One or two people. The one who matters is whoever can describe what is actually going wrong, and the useful pairing is the person who owns the process that is stuck plus someone who knows the systems and data underneath it, because access, data and decision rights shape a scope far more than ambition does. A budget holder is not needed and procurement does not have to be in the room. Nothing gets signed in thirty minutes, and a supplier review can run on its own track through legal@tenhaw.com. If the people who should hear it cannot make the time, take the call anyway and pass on the rough scope you leave with.

Do we need an NDA before we describe our problem?

No. Tenhaw's 30-minute discovery call runs on a spoken description of what is slow, expensive or stuck, so nothing has to be handed over on paper before James Rooney can give you a rough scope, and you can leave names and identifiers out of it. Published rather than asserted on the call, the confidentiality position is written into the engagement agreement and survives the end of the engagement indefinitely. Of the ten organisations behind the case studies, nine are named and the live one is described only as the London specialty insurance market, at that client's request. Whether your own policy requires paper before any scoping conversation is a question for your counsel.

Do we need budget approved before we get in touch?

No. Tenhaw publishes its prices rather than quoting them, so the figures an approval paper needs exist before you make contact, £44,000 fixed over four weeks for the AI Readiness Audit and £20,000 to £55,000 over two to four weeks for an Agentic Proof of Concept. Nothing in the thirty minutes asks what you have to spend, and no budget figure is needed to book it. Because both are fixed rather than estimated, the number you put in front of a finance committee is the number that lands on the invoice. Which of the two your problem actually needs is the line only a scoping conversation settles.

Do you need to see our systems before you can price the work?

No. Tenhaw prices from a description of the problem rather than a survey of your estate, which is why the AI Readiness Audit carries one fixed price for four weeks whatever the stack underneath turns out to be. What does move a price is the complexity of the workflow and the state of the data behind it, and you can describe both without granting access to anything. Access comes later and on your terms, following a signed Statement of Work, with BS7858-standard screening covering identity, right to work, employment history and criminal record checks completed before anyone reaches your estate. Whether the data is genuinely usable is the thing only the work settles.

Should we send an RFP rather than book a discovery call?

You can, and Tenhaw answers one mostly from material already published rather than written for the occasion. Most of what an RFP asks for exists in fixed form: the rate card at £1,560 for a partner, £1,250 for a senior practitioner and £950 for an associate, excluding VAT, the engagement prices derived from it at twenty billable days a month, and the delivery method published in full and free to adopt. What an RFP written this early tends to get wrong is the specification itself, because a document drafted before the problem has been scoped usually names a solution rather than an outcome. Whether your buying rules permit a conversation before the paperwork decides the order.

We are not ready to start until next year. Is it worth talking now?

Usually, yes. Tenhaw's AI Readiness Audit is standalone work: four weeks, a fixed published price, no obligation to continue, and a recommendation to stop counted as a valid outcome. So the assessment can sit in this year's budget while a build sits in next year's, rather than both waiting on one approval. Anything monthly that follows ends on thirty days' notice either side, so a start date early in a budget year does not commit the whole of it. What a conversation now cannot settle is whether the priority survives your budget round, and that is a question about your organisation rather than about the work.

If the sources do not answer it, a call will.

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