Answers from your knowledge
Retrieval over your own documents, policies and history, with a citation on every answer so anyone can check it.
AI agents & assistants · Manchester
AI agents and chatbots, built for Manchester
Assistants that answer from your own documents with citations, qualify enquiries before they reach a person, and hand over cleanly when the answer matters. Not a widget that apologises for not understanding.
- 2020Founded
- Monday to FridayWe work your week
- Written scopeBefore anything is built
- You own itCode, data, infrastructure
Why Manchester
Manchester businesses do not have a technology problem. They have a process problem.
Retail and ecommerce support volume in Manchester is dominated by a handful of repeated questions about orders, delivery and returns. Those deflect well — but only if the assistant can see the actual order and says so plainly when it cannot, rather than generating a confident sentence about a parcel it knows nothing about.
Manchester is the largest technology employer outside London and the character of the work reflects it: ambitious mid-sized companies, often founder-led, who have outgrown spreadsheets and will not pay London rates for the privilege of fixing that. The usual shape here is an operations platform that replaces a decade of accumulated workarounds, built in stages so the business keeps running while it is replaced.
The difference between an assistant that earns its place and one that gets switched off in a month is almost never the model. It is whether it answers from your material rather than from memory, whether it says "I do not know" instead of inventing something, and whether it hands over to a human at the right moment with the conversation attached.
Ce que nous concevons
AI agents & assistants, built to be run by your team.
Qualification before escalation
The assistant gathers what a person would have had to ask for anyway, so the first human conversation starts from a complete picture.
Clean hand-over
When it should stop, it stops — and passes the full conversation, the documents and what it was unsure about to a named person.
Voice as well as text
The same assistant on the phone and on the page, in the visitor's language, with the same limits in both.
Guarded by design
Narrow tools, no ability to send, pay or publish on its own, and defences against instructions hidden inside the content it reads.
Measured, not assumed
Resolution rate, escalation rate and what it got wrong, reviewed on a cadence with the people who answer those questions today.
Proof you can open
Systems that exist, not case studies that describe them.
NOVA, live on this site
Our own assistant answers from every page of this site, in text and voice, in seven languages, and hands over to an engineer. Try it before you call us.
Open it ↗Accueil immigration assisté par IA
Adaptive questioning, document handling, completeness signals and a staff hand-off — a working example of an assistant inside a regulated workflow.
Open it ↗Our ecommerce and operations work transfers directly: a WooCommerce storefront at thekulturedkid.store, and role-aware operations platforms you can open and use.
What good looks like
Four tests any supplier should pass.
If you are comparing suppliers in Manchester, these are worth asking about before the portfolio comes out. They separate a system that will still be working in three years from one that demonstrates well.
- Every answer carries a source, so trust is verifiable rather than requested.
- It refuses rather than guesses, and the refusal routes somewhere useful.
- A person can see the whole conversation when it reaches them, and does not start from nothing.
- It cannot take an irreversible action on its own, however the conversation is phrased.
How an engagement runs
Bounded, staged, and reversible at every point.
- Cartographier
We find the real bottleneck, the owners, the data and the decision the system has to make. Usually three to five days.
- Prove
A fixed-scope sprint on the riskiest part, with a success criterion agreed in writing beforehand and the honest answer at the end — including stop.
- Développer
Staged releases, each usable on its own, so the business keeps running while it changes.
- Hand over
Written architecture decisions, a runbook, training, and code your team can read. Support is a separate choice, not an assumption.
What it costs
We publish one fixed price — a fixed-scope AI sprint — and we will not quote a workflow we have not seen. The estimator will give you a phased plan, a timeline band and an indicative size against that price, as a document you can forward to whoever signs.
Working with Manchester
Time zones, handled rather than hoped
Four hours behind Karachi in winter, five in summer. A full working afternoon of overlap. Most Manchester clients settle into a Tuesday review at 10:00 their time, which is mid-afternoon here.
What a build here has to satisfy
Rules that shape the architecture
Same UK GDPR regime as London. Manchester buyers are more likely to be working with legacy line-of-business software, so the early question is usually whether the incumbent system can be integrated at all, and that is answered before anyone estimates.
Before you call
The questions we get asked first.
How is this different from the chatbot on our website now?
Most website chatbots match keywords to canned answers. This retrieves the relevant passages from your own material and answers from them with a citation, and it is built to hand over rather than to keep somebody trapped in a loop.
Will it make things up?
Language models can, which is why the system is built to contain it: retrieval over your documents, citations shown, output validated against a structure, and a person in front of anything that is binding.
Can it work in Arabic or Urdu as well as English?
Yes, and properly — right-to-left layout, correct typography and answers in the language the question was asked in. This site itself runs in seven languages with hand-written Arabic and Urdu pages.
What about confidential documents?
We agree in writing which service processes what, and use providers contractually bound not to retain your data or train on it. Where the workflow allows, material is redacted before it goes anywhere it does not need to be.
Can it book appointments or update our CRM?
It can, and that is exactly where care is needed. Actions that change records or commit time are given narrowly, logged, and in most designs confirmed by a person.
Next step
Dites-nous ce qui ralentit votre entreprise.
Bring the workflow, the product idea or the growth problem. We will tell you what we would build, what we would not, and what it would take — and if the answer is that you should buy something instead, we will say that.
ASTACKRA · 15/5 Block 3D, Nazimabad No. 3, Karachi · +92 313 8168638 · Serving Manchester remotely · Working week: Monday to Friday
Other work we do in Manchester