Experts in agentic AI consultancy for UK businesses
Codebased, a software engineering firm based in Stafford, Staffordshire, has launched an agentic AI consultancy: a service that identifies the processes in a business where AI agents will deliver measurable returns, then designs, builds and operates those agents inside the client's existing systems.
The service addresses a gap that has widened over the past two years. Most organisations now have access to capable AI models; few have connected them to the systems where their work actually happens. A generic assistant cannot see a company's job data, pricing rules or order history, so its usefulness ends at drafting and research. The value is in the integration, and the integration is an engineering problem.
Codebased has spent the past year building these integrations in production, connecting AI assistants to live business systems using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for giving AI controlled access to data and actions. The consultancy formalises that work into a defined service, underpinned by Google professional AI certification, OpenAI's training programmes, and membership of the OpenAI partner programme.
The service
Engagements begin with a process assessment. Codebased maps how work moves through the business, measures where time is spent, and identifies the processes where agents will generate the highest return. In a typical assessment, two or three candidates emerge within the first day.
Implementation follows one of two routes. Where existing systems are sound, agents are integrated directly into them: reading from and writing to the software the business already runs, with no migration required. Where the opportunity justifies it, Codebased designs and builds the application around the AI, drawing on its established AI development and custom software practices.
Every deployment is measured against the process it replaces. Expansion happens only after the first process has demonstrated its return.
Applications
Enquiry handling and quotation
Inbound enquiries are read, categorised and researched against customer and pricing data, with draft responses prepared for human approval. Quotations that previously required an afternoon of assembly are ready for review in minutes.
Operational intelligence
Status, performance and reporting questions answered directly from live systems. Scheduled reports are produced overnight and waiting at the start of the working day, and operational knowledge that previously depended on individual staff becomes available to the whole organisation.
Administrative automation
Invoice and purchase-order reconciliation, document chasing, form completion, and data transfer between systems that were never designed to work together. High-volume, low-judgment work that consumes staff time without requiring staff expertise.
Continuous market intelligence
Agents also make new work economical: monitoring that no business would previously have staffed. Competitor websites, pricing, recruitment activity and press coverage reviewed weekly and delivered as a Monday-morning briefing. Review platforms monitored continuously. New tender opportunities screened daily against the company's capabilities. Historic quotations analysed for follow-up opportunities. The cost of running such an agent is measured in pence per execution; the effect is a standard of market awareness previously available only to organisations with dedicated analysts.
Outcomes
The efficiency case is direct. Processes that take days complete in minutes: a tender response that consumed a week of assembly is drafted, formatted and ready for expert review in a morning. Agents operate continuously, including outside business hours, so reporting, triage and monitoring complete before the working day begins.
The capacity case is larger. In many administrative and commercial roles, information assembly accounts for half of working time or more. Automating it changes what a team of a given size can produce, and removes headcount as the constraint on how much work the business can take on. Staff time concentrates on judgment: pricing decisions, exceptions, and the customer conversations that determine whether work is won.
Governance and security
Agentic systems touch customer data, pricing and correspondence, and are engineered accordingly. Client data is processed under commercial agreements and is not used to train third-party models. Agents operate with the minimum access required for their function, and actions with external effect, such as sending correspondence or committing transactions, pass through human approval. All agent activity is logged and auditable. UK GDPR compliance is designed in from the first assessment, and all agent output destined for production passes senior engineering review, the same standard Codebased applies to its own use of AI.
The assessment also defines where automation is not appropriate. Decisions with legal, financial or personal consequence retain a human decision-maker by design, with the boundary documented rather than assumed.
Engagement model
The consultancy is structured to limit client risk. An initial assessment produces a costed shortlist of candidate processes. A single process is then built, deployed and measured against its previous cost and turnaround time. Wider rollout proceeds on evidence. No client is asked to commit to a transformation programme. A companion article sets out what AI agents cost UK businesses, and the approach mirrors the incremental method Codebased applies to legacy software development and support.
"Most businesses do not need convincing that AI matters. They need someone to connect it to their systems safely and prove the return on a real process," said Nick Langley, director of Codebased. "That is engineering work, and it is the work we have been doing all year."
Availability
The agentic AI consultancy is available to UK businesses now. Initial discussions are held as a discovery call with a senior engineer, at no cost, and typically establish within an hour whether a business has processes where agents will pay back quickly.