Hire an AI Agency or Build an In House AI Team?

When building an in house AI team is the right call

Tepia is an agency and will still say this clearly: some companies should hire.

• AI is the product. If your company’s value is the model, the data pipeline or the agent, you need people who live inside it every day. An agency can build version one, but the team should be yours.
• Proprietary research. If you are fine tuning or training models on unique data as a competitive moat, that is research capacity, not project work.
• Existing engineering depth. If you already have a strong backend and data team, adding one AI specialist and pairing them with an agency for the first build is often the cheapest path of all.

The hybrid pattern in that last point is the one Tepia recommends most often, and it is how Tepia works with clients who intend to own their AI long term.

How Tepia approaches an AI engagement so you are not dependent on an agency

Tepia’s six phase process is designed to transfer ownership, which is the main fear buyers have about agencies.

1. Discovery (typically 3 to 6 weeks). Use case scoring, data readiness review and third party tool review. Deliverables: Investigation Summary, Interview Summary and User Stories, with a written recommendation that may include hiring instead of building with Tepia.
2. Design. Design questionnaire, style guide, wireframes and sample designs for how the AI appears in the product, including confidence cues and human handoff.
3. Development and Testing. A 6 to 8 week pilot on real data, then Alpha and Beta schedules with functional, user acceptance and non functional testing. Tepia builds an evaluation set of real questions and expected answers and hands it over as a living asset.
4. Training. This is where the hybrid model lives. Tepia runs hands on sessions, in person or remote, for the engineer or analyst who will own the feature: how retrieval works, how to update knowledge sources, how to read the evaluation dashboard, how to tune prompts safely.
5. Many clients use it heavily for three months and then taper as their own team takes over, which is the intended outcome.

You own the code, the prompts, the evaluation sets and the documentation. Tepia’s work with Newport Medical Solutions drew this comment from its CIO: “We were impressed with Tepia’s genuine passion for their craft.” That is the standard Tepia works to on handoff as well as build.

Tepia's honest summary

Hire an agency when you have a small number of well defined AI use cases, need results this quarter, and do not yet know whether AI will be central to your business. Build a team when AI is the product, the backlog is deep, or you are doing proprietary model work. Use the hybrid when you have engineers but no AI experience: Tepia builds version one, trains your owner, and steps back.

Tepia has thirteen years of disciplined engineering behind its AI work and a project manager on every engagement. Review Tepia’s work, services and process, or contact Tepia to compare the numbers for your situation.

Frequently asked questions