Shipped a financial-services team's first production AI workload in 3 days, with evaluation, guardrails and governance built in from the first commit

We ran a 3-day intensive that took a US financial-services team from AI experimentation to their first production-ready workload, delivered with an evaluation harness, guardrails and infrastructure-as-code, and aligned with the governance and model-risk expectations a regulated financial business must meet.

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The challenge

A US financial-services firm wanted to move beyond AI experimentation into production, but their engineers needed concrete, trustworthy patterns and their business leaders needed a shared vocabulary for governance and risk. In financial services, shipping an AI workload without evaluation, guardrails and a clear model-risk story is a non-starter, so speed alone was worthless: the first production workload had to be defensible under internal review, not just functional.

What we built

Ran a 3-day intensive: day 1 with engineering on architecture patterns, security and evaluation; days 2-3 building a production-ready workload end-to-end

Ran parallel sessions with business leaders on AI strategy, governance and prioritisation frameworks so risk ownership was clear

Delivered a working reference workload with infrastructure-as-code, an evaluation harness and guardrails the team could inspect and trust

Left an internal playbook the team uses to greenlight and govern subsequent AI initiatives

Architecture

Outcomes

The team shipped their first production AI workload within the 3 days, with an evaluation harness, guardrails and governance built in from the first commit

Engineering and business stakeholders aligned on the AI roadmap and its guardrails

Infrastructure-as-code and evaluation made the workload reproducible and defensible under internal review

An internal playbook now used to govern and greenlight further AI initiatives

Results

3 days

to first production workload

£90k

wasted build avoided

engineers upskilled

90%

evaluation coverage

Stack

AWS Bedrock

AWS CDK

Python

Evaluation tooling

Internal change-management playbook

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Ready when you are

Ready to take AI from pilot to production?

Book a free discovery call with our team of ex-AWS engineers. We'll discuss your regulated-industry challenges and outline a governed path from pilot to production. No commitment required.