AI Development — Custom AI Solutions Built for Production

When AI Development From ZTABS Is the Wrong Fit

• ⚠You want a $5K chatbot 'just to see what's possible'. A production AI integration with auth, guardrails, logging, and a real UI starts at $15K. Below that, you should use an off-the-shelf tool like Intercom Fin, Chatbase, or Zendesk AI — you'll get 80% of the value in a week with no engineering.
• ⚠Your training data is 40 messy PDFs and no schema. RAG and fine-tuning both assume your source data is clean, deduplicated, and labeled. If it isn't, the first 30–50% of the budget goes to data preparation — and that's a problem a data engineering firm, not an AI agency, should solve first. We'll tell you this on the discovery call.
• ⚠You need regulatory AI explainability (FDA, banking, insurance). LLMs are not explainable in the regulatory sense — you cannot produce a deterministic decision trace auditors will accept. For these use cases, classical ML (logistic regression, gradient boosting) with SHAP/LIME explanations is the right call. We'll refer you to an ML-specialist firm.
• ⚠You want agents that run autonomously for hours with zero human review. State-of-the-art agent reliability in late-2025 is ~85–92% on multi-step tasks. For high-stakes workflows (financial transactions, legal filings, customer refunds), one failure in ten is not acceptable. We build human-in-the-loop systems for these — and decline fully-autonomous agent projects in regulated domains.
• ⚠Budget cap is <$20K and timeline is <4 weeks. We can't staff a multi-disciplinary AI team (PM + ML + backend + frontend + QA) for that envelope. You'll get better outcomes from a freelance AI engineer on Contra or an async-only fractional team. We charge too much to be the right fit here and will say so.