AI consultancy and bespoke software for UK organisations.
We help organisations work out where AI earns its place, then build it. Both halves of the job, by the same team that signs off on the production release.
Founded in Durham in 2020. Now based across Durham and Cambridge.
OpenKit was founded in 2020 by Ibrahim and Reuben, two Durham Computer Science graduates building bespoke software for private clients: web platforms, internal tools, mobile builds. The brief was always the same shape, build something for the way this organisation actually works rather than the way an off-the-shelf product wants it to.
By 2022 the work had broadened to London councils, the Department for Education and other organisations where the data and the audit trail matter. We certified ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 in the same audit cycle to support that move, and the engagement model tightened around named accountability and UK-only delivery from the founders down.
From 2023 onwards AI started showing up in almost every brief, so we split the practice into two halves that share the same engineers. The consultancy side decides where AI earns its place, and the build side ships it under the same controls we already ran for bespoke software. The team has stayed deliberately small. The standards have not changed.
Designed for the room the work has to survive in.
Every system we build assumes that someone will eventually need to defend a decision it produced, whether that is a fee earner, a clinician, a council officer or the regulator in the room with them. So we treat verification as a design constraint rather than a nice-to-have, with source citations, confidence scores and named owners on every workflow we hand over.
That standard runs through the whole engagement, from the first workshop where we decide which processes are actually worth automating, through the platform configuration under your existing security model, to the day a new joiner is trained to author their own workflow. AI is allowed to change what you ship through your operations. It is not allowed to weaken how you defend the output.
AI we can defend, by the people who built it.
Every system we ship is designed so the team using it can explain how a decision was made, not just that one was made. Source citations on the documents, confidence scores on the answers, named owners on the workflows, and a verification step the user can take before they trust the output. AI is not allowed to operate in a way the regulator, the client’s CTO or the audit committee cannot reconstruct after the fact.
The security model is the same one your firm already runs. We work under ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials from the first workshop, in UK data regions, with the access policies your team already operates. No new threat surfaces, no new compliance review, no black boxes that nobody on your team has the keys to.
We also turn work down. Not every process is a good fit for AI, and the engagements we are proudest of are sometimes the ones we talked the client out of. If the right answer to a brief is “this should not be automated”, that is what we will say.
Three connected steps. Most clients start at step one.
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AI Transformation Block
A single combined consultancy and rollout. We spend the first week auditing how you actually work, choosing the platform with the right data residency for your firm and identifying the four to six workflows worth building first, then roll them out alongside your team across the remaining three weeks. Audit and implementation in the same block, so the team feels the change while we are still on site to answer the follow-up questions.
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Embedded AI Lead
A named OpenKit engineer picks up where the block ends, working alongside your team in a hybrid pattern. They build new workflows as the team finds new use for them, deepen integrations beyond the initial scope, and bring new joiners up to speed on the platform. Forward-deployed, but the kind that stays.
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Bespoke Engagement
Where the scope is already clear and the work is fundamentally a custom build, we take it on directly. Most clients arrive at bespoke through the transformation route. The four-week block puts real value into the firm at a fraction of the cost of starting from a bespoke quote, and shows you what is actually worth building before anyone signs off on building it.
The founders.
The two co-founded OpenKit in 2020 and have run every engagement since. They scope each project personally, write the proposal and stay technically attached through delivery. The two engineers on the call are the two engineers building the work.
Senior engineers only, with no account managers between you and the team. The same engineer who scopes the work writes the code.
Audited annually by UKAS-accredited bodies.
Information security, quality management and cyber hygiene are renewed each year against the same standards UK regulated buyers are already running their own teams under. Every engagement runs under those controls from the first workshop, so the security review is not a separate project.
- ISO 27001:2022 Information security
- ISO 9001:2015 Quality management
- Cyber Essentials UK government scheme
- UK GDPR Documented per project
Durham and Cambridge. UK delivered.
We work out of two offices, in Durham where the company began and in Cambridge where we run client engagements day to day. The rest of the team works remotely across the UK, with on-site days for London clients arranged in advance.
- Offices
- Durham & Cambridge
- Hosting
- UK regions only
- Team residency
- UK only
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