We design and ship production AI software, RAG systems, knowledge bases, and custom ML models, in 8-16 weeks. For mid-market teams across Europe and the US who've outgrown what they can buy.
Track record
More likely to ship than internal AI builds, per MIT 2025 research.
Years building AI in production before the hype cycle made it trendy.
How we build
Four things that decide if your AI build ships
Most custom AI builds fail in the gap between prototype and production. These four are where we close it.
Data Foundation
Production AI lives or dies on data quality. We architect retrieval, embeddings, and access controls before we write the first prompt. If your data isn't ready, neither is your AI.
Model Selection
Frontier vs open-source vs fine-tuned. Anthropic vs OpenAI vs your own weights. We pick what fits the use case, not what's trending on X.
Production Engineering
Logging, evals, retries, fallbacks, cost monitoring, latency guarantees. The boring engineering that separates a demo from a system your team trusts to run unattended.
Handover
You get the code, the documentation, the runbooks, and the test suites. Your engineers can run it, audit it, extend it. We're not a dependency, we're a deliverable.
Companies we work for
What we build
Custom AI systems we ship to production
Every build is scoped, fixed-price, and delivered in 8-16 weeks. You own everything we ship.
RAG
RAG Systems
Search and chat over your private data. Documents, support tickets, contracts, code, anything text-based. Built with grounded retrieval, source citations, and access controls.
Time to production
8-12 weeks
KNOWLEDGE BASE
Enterprise Knowledge
A single source of truth your team can actually query in plain language. Connects to your existing tools, respects existing permissions,.
Documents indexed
Millions
MODELS
Custom ML Models
When off-the-shelf models don't fit your data. Classification, prediction, scoring, ranking. Trained on your data, evaluated on your benchmarks, deployed on your infrastructure.
Use case fit
Bespoke
AGENTS
Production AI Agents
Autonomous systems that take action across your stack. Built when "answer a question" isn't enough and the agent has to actually do the work.
Time to first action
Same day
PIPELINES
AI-Powered Pipelines
Bulk processing, classification, enrichment, and routing at scale. AI as the engine inside your existing data infrastructure, not a separate product to maintain.
Documents processed
100k+/day
Don't see your build?
Every custom build starts as an unknown. Tell us what you're trying to ship, and we'll tell you honestly whether we can do it.
Every build follows the same shape. Scope and price upfront, design and prototype before we write production code, ship to production with full handover.
"The team at What's Next have proven to be strong and reliable partners in translating our AI ambitions into tangible results.
Together, we pushed our tender review timelines from weeks to hours."
You own the code, the documentation, the test suites, and the runbooks. Your team can audit, run, and extend it without us in the room.
What you need to know
How is this different from hiring an internal AI team?
Internal teams take 12-18 months to hire and ramp. We've shipped these systems before, on similar stacks, for similar use cases. You get production code in 8-16 weeks, no recruiting cycle, no junior-team mistakes. After handover your team owns it, so you're not creating long-term dependency.
What stack do you build on?
Whatever fits the use case. We work with Anthropic, OpenAI, and open-source models. LangGraph, LlamaIndex, n8n, custom Python. We pick the stack for the build, not the build for the stack. You'll know exactly what we're using before we write a line of code.
How do you handle data security and compliance?
We run on your infrastructure or your cloud, never ours. No customer data leaves your perimeter. We design for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 environments and work alongside your security team from day one. Logging, access controls, and audit trails on every build.
What if our requirements change mid-build?
Scope changes happen. We handle them with a written change request, a new fixed price for the delta, and an updated timeline. No surprise invoices, no scope-creep death spiral. The original deliverable stays anchored unless you choose to change it.
Ship the AI build your team can't
Tell us what you're trying to build. We'll scope it, price it, and ship it in 8-16 weeks. Or tell you honestly if we can't.