Ship a working AI system to production in 90 days.
We find where AI pays off in your operation, then forward deploy the engineers who build it.
Clutch verified
for US mid market
in production
$50M to $500M ARR
95% of AI pilots in mid market companies never make it to production.
All in cost of a senior US AI hire, and six months to land one. Most mid market teams can't absorb it.
MIT NANDA, 2025. Vendor led projects ship at 2x the rate of internal led.
The reason isn't the technology. It's the plan.
So we start with one: a fixed scope readiness assessment, and an honest answer.
Map. Prove. Deploy.
Map
Every workflow in your operation, ranked by ROI, TCO, and feasibility.
Prove
Built against your real cases. Measured accuracy before anything ships.
Deploy
Production when the evals pass. Your team can run what ships.
Know first. Then build.
- Know which workflow pays back first
- Expected ROI and TCO, numbers finance can approve
- A 90 day plan you can hand to any team
- An honest no, if AI is not your next move
Standard $7,500. Founding cohort $2,500, founder-led. Credited in full toward a build within 60 days.
Get your AI Readiness Assessment →- A working AI system in production in 90 days
- Measured eval pass rates before anything ships
- Deepest bench in Ruby on Rails, fluent in any stack
- Your team can run what ships. No handoff cliff.
A senior AI hire: $300K+ and six months. This: $114K a year, deployed in 7 to 10 days.
Book a 30 min call →Each starts with a quick fit check. We confirm we can help before you pay anything.
Also here: our ten year embedded staff augmentation practice. Senior engineers, indistinguishable from your full time team. Beyond staff augmentation
“The quality of the staff Density Labs provides us is very high.”
Kevin Dyck · Manager, Product & UX Design, Ooma
Federico Ramallo. Two decades shipping production software.
Founder of Density Labs since 2016. Author of The Invisible Distance. Host of The PreVetted Podcast, 150 plus conversations with CTOs and VPs of Engineering.
Questions buyers ask.
Should we build AI in-house or hire a partner?
For a first build, a partner is usually faster and lower risk. An internal AI team runs well over $400K a year and takes months to hire and ramp; a partner starts in days. The pattern that works: partner for version one, transfer the knowledge, then internalize what proves out. Our in-house vs outside team comparison lays out the real cost on both sides.
Why do most AI pilots never reach production?
Roughly 80 to 95 percent stall, and almost never because of the model. They die on the org side: no owner whose job depends on it shipping, data that was hand-cleaned for the demo, and output that lands in a dashboard nobody opens. We wrote up the four ways pilots die and the tell for each one before you start.
What does the AI Readiness Assessment include, and what does it cost?
$2,500, founding-cohort price, in two weeks. You get a ranked inventory of where AI pays off in your operation, the total cost of running each one, a 90-day build plan with the integration point named, and an honest go or no-go. Full breakdown: what the assessment actually includes. The fee is credited in full toward the build.
What is a Forward Deployed AI Engineer?
A senior engineer who builds your AI system to production inside your real environment, not a demo. The role exists because the demo-to-production gap is where pilots fail, and it needs an engineer who owns the outcome, not a proof of concept. It is how we take the assessment's plan and ship it in 90 days.
Is Density Labs a fit for a mid-market company?
Yes. We work with US mid-market companies ($50M to $500M ARR) that have one to three concrete workflows in mind and a real deadline. If you are rethinking your whole operating model, buy strategy consulting. If you have a specific system that obviously wants building and need to know which one and whether it pays, that is exactly what we do.
Start with the AI Readiness Assessment.
Two weeks. $2,500. You know where AI pays off, what it costs, and whether it is worth building. Yours to keep.
Get your AI Readiness Assessment