Content pipeline
Content pipeline running on autopilot
Keyword research and publishing pipeline for an in-house SEO stack. Indexed pages generated, linked, and maintained without a writer on payroll.
Publishing without an in-house writer
Engineering studio, London
Custom AI systems for UK firms.
Built for the work that doesn't fit a tool you can buy.
2 of 3 spots available for July 2026·Booking now
Why build, not buy
Three reasons mid-market firms are walking away from subscription AI.
01
Eighteen months of seat licences pay for a bespoke build outright.
Enterprise AI products typically charge £1,200 to £2,400 per seat per month for a wrapper on the same foundation models we build with directly. For a mid-market team, two years of seat subscriptions outspend a one-off project. The maths fits on a single slide for the board.
02
The vendor you train can become your competitor.
A pattern that surfaced loudly in 2025: vendors building services that compete with the customers feeding them data. The platform you pay for, integrate with, and train becomes the one that replaces you. Bespoke keeps your data, your workflows, and the IP they produce inside your firm.
03
Off-the-shelf forces your process to bend.
Subscription platforms enforce their own data model, their own automation limits, their own roadmap. Teams describe being capped at arbitrary thresholds, missing the integrations they need, and waiting quarters for features stuck in vendor backlog. Bespoke fits the way your team actually works.
Example systems
Systems we've shipped.
View all 12 case studiesIn their own words
Operators we've built for.
From City law firms, private healthcare groups, and executive search practices across the UK.
LinkedIn · March 2026
We'd been trying to automate matter intake inside iManage for nearly a year. Two consultancies, zero progress.
Robin shipped more in eight weeks than we'd managed in twelve months.
The weekly check-ins meant partners always knew exactly what was landing next.
Sarah MercerChief Operating Officer, Harwell Mayfair LLP
Email · January 2026
We were paying a Big Four consultancy £22k a month for an AI roadmap and couldn't tell you what had shipped.
Robin quoted a fixed price, built in eight weeks, and we own the source. That shouldn't feel rare, but it does.
Thomas HarringtonChief Operating Officer, Harley West Clinical Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
We'd been trying to automate matter intake inside iManage for nearly a year. Two consultancies, zero progress.
Robin shipped more in eight weeks than we'd managed in twelve months.
The weekly check-ins meant partners always knew exactly what was landing next.
Sarah MercerChief Operating Officer, Harwell Mayfair LLP
Email · January 2026
We were paying a Big Four consultancy £22k a month for an AI roadmap and couldn't tell you what had shipped.
Robin quoted a fixed price, built in eight weeks, and we own the source. That shouldn't feel rare, but it does.
Thomas HarringtonChief Operating Officer, Harley West Clinical Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
We'd been trying to automate matter intake inside iManage for nearly a year. Two consultancies, zero progress.
Robin shipped more in eight weeks than we'd managed in twelve months.
The weekly check-ins meant partners always knew exactly what was landing next.
Sarah MercerChief Operating Officer, Harwell Mayfair LLP
Email · January 2026
We were paying a Big Four consultancy £22k a month for an AI roadmap and couldn't tell you what had shipped.
Robin quoted a fixed price, built in eight weeks, and we own the source. That shouldn't feel rare, but it does.
Thomas HarringtonChief Operating Officer, Harley West Clinical Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
We'd been trying to automate matter intake inside iManage for nearly a year. Two consultancies, zero progress.
Robin shipped more in eight weeks than we'd managed in twelve months.
The weekly check-ins meant partners always knew exactly what was landing next.
Sarah MercerChief Operating Officer, Harwell Mayfair LLP
Email · January 2026
We were paying a Big Four consultancy £22k a month for an AI roadmap and couldn't tell you what had shipped.
Robin quoted a fixed price, built in eight weeks, and we own the source. That shouldn't feel rare, but it does.
Thomas HarringtonChief Operating Officer, Harley West Clinical Group
Email · February 2026
We brief Robin on a Monday and by Friday the thing we asked for is running in our Bullhorn instance.
I've never worked with a technical partner who moves at that pace.
Our consultants spend their mornings on candidates instead of data entry now.
David ReevesManaging Partner, Farringdon Executive Search
Reviews.io · February 2026
Our consultants were losing close to two hours each per day to manual note admin and letter drafting.
Within ten weeks we had that time back, with an audit trail our DPO was happy with.
Robin presented to the board in plain English. No slides about transformers.
Dr. Priya KhannaClinical Director, Marylebone Clinic Partners
Email · February 2026
We brief Robin on a Monday and by Friday the thing we asked for is running in our Bullhorn instance.
I've never worked with a technical partner who moves at that pace.
Our consultants spend their mornings on candidates instead of data entry now.
David ReevesManaging Partner, Farringdon Executive Search
Reviews.io · February 2026
Our consultants were losing close to two hours each per day to manual note admin and letter drafting.
Within ten weeks we had that time back, with an audit trail our DPO was happy with.
Robin presented to the board in plain English. No slides about transformers.
Dr. Priya KhannaClinical Director, Marylebone Clinic Partners
Email · February 2026
We brief Robin on a Monday and by Friday the thing we asked for is running in our Bullhorn instance.
I've never worked with a technical partner who moves at that pace.
Our consultants spend their mornings on candidates instead of data entry now.
David ReevesManaging Partner, Farringdon Executive Search
Reviews.io · February 2026
Our consultants were losing close to two hours each per day to manual note admin and letter drafting.
Within ten weeks we had that time back, with an audit trail our DPO was happy with.
Robin presented to the board in plain English. No slides about transformers.
Dr. Priya KhannaClinical Director, Marylebone Clinic Partners
Email · February 2026
We brief Robin on a Monday and by Friday the thing we asked for is running in our Bullhorn instance.
I've never worked with a technical partner who moves at that pace.
Our consultants spend their mornings on candidates instead of data entry now.
David ReevesManaging Partner, Farringdon Executive Search
Reviews.io · February 2026
Our consultants were losing close to two hours each per day to manual note admin and letter drafting.
Within ten weeks we had that time back, with an audit trail our DPO was happy with.
Robin presented to the board in plain English. No slides about transformers.
Dr. Priya KhannaClinical Director, Marylebone Clinic Partners
LinkedIn · March 2026
First-pass review on standard ISDAs and facility agreements was eating forty hours a week of junior time.
After Robin's build it's closer to four. The output is sharper than what the juniors were producing.
James PritchardHead of Banking & Finance, Thornbury Weston LLP
LinkedIn · March 2026
Two vendors before Robin sold us dashboards and monthly seat licences. Both quietly got shut down after a year.
Robin built something we actually own. Code sits in our repo, runs on our AWS, no-one to renew with.
Christopher TavernierChief of Staff, Berkeley Anders Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
First-pass review on standard ISDAs and facility agreements was eating forty hours a week of junior time.
After Robin's build it's closer to four. The output is sharper than what the juniors were producing.
James PritchardHead of Banking & Finance, Thornbury Weston LLP
LinkedIn · March 2026
Two vendors before Robin sold us dashboards and monthly seat licences. Both quietly got shut down after a year.
Robin built something we actually own. Code sits in our repo, runs on our AWS, no-one to renew with.
Christopher TavernierChief of Staff, Berkeley Anders Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
First-pass review on standard ISDAs and facility agreements was eating forty hours a week of junior time.
After Robin's build it's closer to four. The output is sharper than what the juniors were producing.
James PritchardHead of Banking & Finance, Thornbury Weston LLP
LinkedIn · March 2026
Two vendors before Robin sold us dashboards and monthly seat licences. Both quietly got shut down after a year.
Robin built something we actually own. Code sits in our repo, runs on our AWS, no-one to renew with.
Christopher TavernierChief of Staff, Berkeley Anders Group
LinkedIn · March 2026
First-pass review on standard ISDAs and facility agreements was eating forty hours a week of junior time.
After Robin's build it's closer to four. The output is sharper than what the juniors were producing.
James PritchardHead of Banking & Finance, Thornbury Weston LLP
LinkedIn · March 2026
Two vendors before Robin sold us dashboards and monthly seat licences. Both quietly got shut down after a year.
Robin built something we actually own. Code sits in our repo, runs on our AWS, no-one to renew with.
Christopher TavernierChief of Staff, Berkeley Anders Group
What we build
Where automation pays for itself.
Bespoke AI built for the workflows your team is doing manually right now.
Workflow automation
Connect the tools your team already uses with logic, not copy-paste. Slack, HubSpot, Notion, Google Workspace, anything with an API.
Research & intelligence
Hiring signals, funding rounds, and leadership changes from public sources and your CRM. Delivered as a daily brief, not a dashboard.
Back-office reporting
Invoice processing, CRM hygiene, weekly reports, QA. Numbers tick up overnight so the morning doesn't start with a manual export.
Scope. Build. Deliver.
Eight to twelve weeks from first call to handover. Fixed price up front, weekly progress, code signed over on completion.
The model
How a project runs.
Still running, twelve months on.
We'll show you the systems we've shipped and the ones still running in production. The longevity proof, not the launch slide.
Same engineer, day one to day 365.
No offshored second team. No account-manager handoff. The person who scopes the brief is the person writing the code.
Fixed scope, changes in writing.
Scope and price documented before kick-off. Changes written and signed before they're billed. No 'almost done' loop.
The stack we build against
Installed where your team already works.
CRM / Sales
- HubSpot
- Salesforce
- Pipedrive
- Attio
Ops / Comms
- Notion
- Slack
- Gmail
- Airtable
Data / Search
- Companies House
- Crunchbase
- Apollo
Models / Infra
- OpenAI
- Anthropic Claude
- PostgreSQL
- Vercel / Render
Anything with an API or a predictable interface. If it isn't listed, ask.
The founder
Founder-led, by design.
Robin Laires
Founder, Laires Labs
Robin Laires founded Laires Labs after ten years shipping production software, most recently as tech lead at Jellyfish, one of the UK's largest independent digital agencies.
Every Laires Labs build is scoped against your firm's actual data, engineered end-to-end, and installed in the systems your team already uses. No account managers, no offshore dev shop, no handoffs.
10+ yrs engineeringEx-tech lead, JellyfishFounder-ledYou own the code
Common questions
Questions buyers ask before they brief.
Cost, security, ownership, timeline. The ones we answer most on calls.
Stop bending your firm around the software.
Twenty minutes, no pitch deck. We talk about the work that doesn't fit a tool you can buy.
Enquire about a project