AI Agent Development Company in London

The tool registry and the oversight wrapped around it are the cost centres here: a scoped agent proof of concept at London rates, a production internal agent (KYC processor for a bank, claims triage for an insurer, contract-review agent for a law firm), or a full enterprise agent programme. Scope drivers include a working agent against a constrained tool registry, an evaluation harness, a sandboxed demo, challenger documentation, prompt injection defences, Article 22 analysis, FCA Consumer Duty artefacts where applicable, and integration with existing identity, logging, and risk platforms. Customer-facing agents under FCA Consumer Duty supervision add outcomes monitoring, vulnerable-customer detection, and the board-level outcomes report. We quote fixed-fee proposals tied to acceptance criteria rather than open day rates.

FCA Consumer Duty (PRIN 2A), in force from 31 July 2023 for new and existing products and 31 July 2024 for closed products, imposes a duty to deliver good outcomes for retail customers across four areas: products and services, price and value, consumer understanding, and consumer support. Customer-facing agents are squarely in scope. Our builds include calibrated handoff to a human advisor whenever confidence drops below a threshold the firm sets and the FCA can defend, explicit vulnerable-customer detection (financial difficulty signals, distressing life events, comprehension difficulty) that triggers an immediate human handoff, plain-English output review against the consumer understanding outcome, outcomes telemetry (resolution rate, fair-treatment indicators, complaint precursors) that feeds the board pack, and a documented annual outcomes assessment. The FCA has signalled it will request these artefacts on supervisory review.

UK GDPR Article 22 prohibits decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects on data subjects, unless one of three exceptions applies (contract necessity, authorised by law, explicit consent), and even then requires safeguards including human intervention, the right to express a view, and the right to contest. We design London agents around this constraint. Any decision with significant effect (credit decline, insurance claim denial, account closure, employment screening) routes through a documented human review gate, the human reviewer has access to the agent's reasoning trace and can override without friction, the data subject is notified that automated processing was used, the data subject can request review by a different human, and the firm retains records of every override and its reasons. The DPIA records this design explicitly, and the ICO will request it.

Yes, under DCB 0129 (clinical safety case for manufacturers) and DCB 0160 (clinical safety case for deploying organisations), with a clinical safety officer review at every gate. Our NHS agent builds start with a hazard log covering every plausible failure mode (hallucination producing a false clinical recommendation, missed safeguarding flag, demographic accuracy gap, out-of-scope query handling, tool-call failure under load), a clinical evaluation harness measuring accuracy against a clinician-labelled ground truth and demographic fairness across protected characteristics, a documented escalation path to a clinician at every action gate, and MHRA Software as a Medical Device classification where the agent's intended purpose triggers it. All inference runs inside AWS eu-west-2, Azure UK South, or GCP europe-west2 to maintain NHS data residency, and audit logs feed the trust's clinical safety reporting workflow.

Legal professional privilege (LPP) under English law is a fundamental client right, and any agent that handles privileged content has to be designed to preserve it without exception. Our Magic Circle and silver-circle deployments run entirely inside the firm's own AWS eu-west-2 or Azure UK South tenant under firm-controlled encryption keys, with no prompt, output, or tool-call payload leaving the firm. Model providers receive no telemetry on substantive content (we use self-hosted Llama 3 or Mistral, or Bedrock with no data retention contractually confirmed in writing). Access logs are designed to support a privilege log if disclosure is ever ordered. The agent's tool registry is restricted to firm-internal systems with no external API calls that could leak. We deliver a privilege-impact assessment alongside the technical design, aligned with SRA risk outlook guidance and the Law Society's published positions on generative AI.

We run a multi-layer evaluation harness built on Inspect AI (the UK AI Safety Institute's open-source framework), Promptfoo, and DeepEval. Layers include task accuracy against a held-out evaluation set sized for statistical confidence, tool-use safety (does the agent call the right tool with the right arguments, does it gracefully handle tool failures, does it avoid destructive actions outside the policy envelope), prompt injection resistance using OWASP LLM Top 10 attack patterns and red-team suites, jailbreak resistance using published adversarial prompt suites, PII leakage tested with synthetic identifiers, demographic fairness across Equality Act 2010 protected characteristics, reversibility (every action the agent takes has a documented rollback or is gated), and latency and cost SLOs. The harness runs in CI on every prompt, model, or tool change, so regressions are caught before a release reaches shadow mode.

Vendor choice in regulated London agent deployments is driven by tool-use reliability, data residency, contractual indemnity, and audit posture. For complex tool-use agents we currently prefer Anthropic Claude via Bedrock in eu-west-2 with cross-region inference disabled, because Claude's tool-use reliability and structured-output discipline are well suited to agent loops, and Anthropic's enterprise terms hold up to FCA internal audit. Azure OpenAI in UK South under Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a strong alternative for clients standardised on Microsoft, with the Assistants API or a custom orchestrator. Gemini 2.5 via Vertex europe-west2 is competitive for multimodal agents tightly integrated with Google Workspace. For full weight sovereignty (UK Government, NHS, some PRA cases) we self-host Llama 3 70B, Mistral Large, or Command R+ on London GPU instances and accept a tool-use reliability tradeoff that we manage with stricter schema validation and retry logic.

The Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard (ATRS), mandated by the Central Digital and Data Office and adopted by the Cabinet Office in 2023, requires UK public sector organisations to publish a structured record of algorithmic tools that interact with the public or affect significant decisions. For government agent deployments we deliver a complete ATRS Tier 1 and Tier 2 record covering how and why the agent is used, scope and scale, datasets and their lineage, decision process and human oversight, risks and impacts assessed, and ongoing oversight and review. The record is drafted in plain English suitable for direct publication on gov.uk and reviewed against the Cabinet Office template before release. We also align with the AI Playbook for Government, the GDS Service Standard, and the Office for AI's responsible-use guidance. Every government deployment ships with a published ATRS record on day one.