Innovation PODs — your AI team, on demand

A POD is a small, senior, cross-functional AI squad embedded with your team for a fixed sprint. We bring playbooks, accelerators, and our own InsightLake products — you bring the domain. Most PODs deliver a production system in 12 weeks.

Why PODs

Built for outcomes, not timesheets

PODs replace the slowest parts of enterprise AI delivery — vendor selection, staffing, ramp-up, integration — with a senior squad that already knows the stack.

Speed

12-week production sprints

Discovery to a running system in one quarter. Weekly demos, fortnightly steerco, no death-by-deck.

Senior

Principal-led squads

Every POD is led by a principal engineer or architect with 10+ years in AI, data, or cloud. No bench juniors.

Accelerators

Built on our own AI products

PODs ship with the InsightLake suite — RAG, agents, catalog, prompts, governance — pre-integrated. Months of plumbing, gone.

Embedded

Inside your environment

We deploy in your cloud, behind your IAM, on your data. No data movement, no shadow systems.

Governed

Production-grade from day one

Evaluation harnesses, guardrails, observability, and audit trails baked in. AI you can ship to regulated workloads.

Transfer

Knowledge transfer by design

Your team co-builds and owns the runbooks. The POD leaves behind a system your engineers can run.

POD catalog

Pick a POD — or compose one

Three flagship PODs, plus custom PODs composed across AI/ML, data, app modernization, security, and BI.

Streaming

Kafka & Streaming POD

Assess, build, migrate, or operate Kafka and Flink at enterprise scale.

Confluent, Apache, MSK, Redpanda
Flink & KStream pipelines
Automated migration tooling
InsightKafka health checks

8–16 wk scope-based

3–6 POD members

Domain

Insurance POD

Underwriting and claims modernization with AI — LOB-specific accelerators on InsightUW.

Underwriting & claims automation
Document intelligence & risk scoring
Accelerators per LOB
PAS integrations & clearance

10–14 wk per LOB

4–8 POD members

Data

Data Platform POD

Build or modernize the data layer underneath AI — lakehouse, catalog, quality, lineage.

Snowflake / Databricks / BigQuery
Insight Catalog & governance
Streaming + batch pipelines

10–14 wk typical

4–6 POD members

Cloud

Cloud & FinOps POD

Cloud strategy, migration, and FinOps discipline — ready your environment for AI workloads.

AWS / GCP / Azure landing zones
Migration automation
FinOps controls & showback

8–14 wk typical

3–5 POD members

Custom

Composable POD

Tell us the outcome. We compose a POD across AI/ML, data, app modernization, security, and BI talent.

Outcome-priced or T&M
Scoped in a one-week discovery
Optional 24x7 run-the-system tier

Flexible scope & duration

Variable composition

How PODs work

From discovery to production in 12 weeks

A repeatable, four-phase rhythm. Weekly demos. Outcomes — not status decks — at every checkpoint.

Discovery

One week. We co-define the outcome, success metrics, data access, and POD composition. You get a fixed proposal.

Foundation

Weeks 2–4. Stand up the platform: environment, data, evaluation harness, and POD ways-of-working with your team.

Build & iterate

Weeks 5–10. Weekly demos against the outcome metric. Continuous evals, guardrails, and stakeholder reviews.

Production & handover

Weeks 11–12. Go-live, runbooks, knowledge transfer, optional run-the-system tier for ongoing operation.

Compare

POD vs. the alternatives

	Innovation POD	Staff augmentation	Fixed-bid consulting
Accountable for outcome	Yes — outcome metric	No — hours	Yes — scope
Time to first value	2–4 weeks	6–12 weeks (ramp)	3–6 months
Seniority of team	Principal-led, senior	Variable	Pyramid (heavy juniors)
Built-in accelerators	InsightLake AI products	None	Vendor playbooks
Change-order risk	Low — weekly demos	N/A	High
Knowledge transfer	Designed in	Incidental	Often weak
Best for	New AI capability, in production	Filling a known gap	Well-defined replatform

Three ways to buy a POD

Match the commercial model to your stage — from board-approved fixed budgets to flexible always-on credits.

Predictable

Fixed-outcome POD

One price for the outcome and the 12-week sprint. Best for board-approved budgets and clear scope.

Flexible

POD on T&M

Pay for the team week by week. Best when scope evolves or you want to extend the POD across multiple use cases.

Always-on

Innovation credits

A pre-purchased pool of POD capacity you draw on across the year. Best for ongoing AI innovation portfolios.

POD outcomes — in the wild

A few engagements where PODs shipped real systems. The full library lives in Case Studies, the blog, and our whitepapers.

AI POD · Financial Services

Ethical AI/ML governance & compliance for a leading financial firm

AI/ML POD · Energy · GCP

Wildfire prediction & management using AI/ML on GCP

Data POD · Hadoop · GCP

On-prem Hadoop (CDH) migration to a modern data lake & ETL stack on GCP

Common questions about PODs

How is a POD different from staff aug?

A POD is accountable for an outcome — not hours. We bring a senior, pre-formed team, our AI products as accelerators, and weekly demos against a real metric.

Where does the POD work?

Inside your environment — your cloud accounts, your IAM, your data. We deploy our accelerators behind your boundary, so nothing leaves.

What if scope changes mid-sprint?

Weekly demos surface scope drift early. We re-baseline at the steerco; fixed-outcome PODs include a change-control budget, T&M PODs flex naturally.

Do we get the code?

Yes. All custom code is yours. Our InsightLake products ship under their own licenses, optionally deployed in your environment.

What's the minimum engagement?

A one-week discovery POD that ends with a fixed proposal. Most full PODs run 8–14 weeks.

Can the POD run our system after launch?

Yes — an optional run-the-system tier provides 24x7 on-call, SLOs, and continuous improvement against your outcome metric.

Ready to scope an Innovation POD?

Tell us the outcome you want and the constraints you're working with. We'll respond within 24 hours with a discovery proposal.