What "managed" actually means, and why it changes the price

The word doing the most work on this website is "managed", so it is worth being plain about what we mean by it and what you should ask any supplier who uses it.

The thing that is actually being sold

You can buy the components of an AI agent cheaply. The models are available to anybody, the connectors exist, and the tooling gets better every month. If you have someone technical with spare time, you can build a version of this yourself, and some businesses should.

What costs money is everything after it works the first time.

Somebody noticing when it drifts. Agents degrade quietly. A system changes a field name, a login expires, a supplier changes a format, and the agent carries on producing output that looks right and is not. Nothing errors. This is the single most important thing to ask about, because a silently wrong agent is worse than no agent — you have stopped checking.

Somebody changing it when you change. You take on a new type of work, a new system, a new client with different rules. The brief needs updating. If that requires a person who has left, or a ticket in a queue, the agent stops matching the business within months.

Somebody being accountable. When the agent gets something wrong in front of a customer, there needs to be a person who answers for it. Not a support form.

That is what the price is. It is not the software.

The questions worth asking any supplier

Who notices when it stops working properly, and how? If the answer is that you will notice, you are not buying a managed service. Ask what monitoring exists and what triggers a human looking at it.

What happens when I want it to do something different? Is that included, is it a change request with a fee, or does it require me to learn something?

What is the response when it does something wrong? Specifically: how fast, and who.

What happens to my data when we stop? Ask before you start, and ask for the answer in writing.

What happens to me if you disappear? The uncomfortable one, and the fair one.

Our answer to that last question

We think it is reasonable to ask, so: the work an agent does for you lives in your systems, not ours. The invoices are in your accounting package, the documents are in your drive, the records are in your systems. If we went away tomorrow, the agent would stop and your business would keep its data, its history and its systems intact.

What you would lose is the agent — the accumulated briefing about how you work. That is a real loss and we are not going to pretend it is not. What it means practically is a return to how things worked before, not a hole in the middle of your business.

We wrote a longer version of this argument when we were a software company, and the principle has not changed: the test of a supplier is what you keep when they are gone.

Why we run our own businesses on this

The most useful thing we can tell you about how we operate is that we are our own most demanding customer. The agents we sell are the agents that run our own operations, and when one drifts it costs us money before it costs anybody else money.

That is not a guarantee. It is an alignment, and it is the honest version of what a supplier can offer.

What this costs

The packages are on the pricing page, starting at £349 a month, and the management is inside that figure rather than beside it. If you are comparing us against something much cheaper, the difference is almost always this — and the right way to compare is to ask the questions above of both.

If you want to ask us any of them directly, that is what the contact page is for.