Biruni APPLIED AI

Applied AI — From Pilot to Production

Most companies don't need more AI pilots. They need one that ships.

Biruni Applied AI is a senior-only consultancy for mid-market and growing companies where being wrong is expensive. We take you from ambition to operating systems in production. We size the opportunity, rebuild the workflow around it, and hand you the code, the evaluations, and the team capability to run it without us. Fixed scope, named deliverables, measurable P&L impact.

$3.5M+
Annualised operating cost removed by engagements our principals and senior practitioners have led
17+
Engagements delivered across regulated and non-regulated industries
6 wks
Median time from kickoff to a working system in production
Trusted by teams at Citco USA Healthy Planet Papaya Naturals American Eagle Supply

01 — Services

Three pathways

Six engagements. No open-ended retainers.

Each engagement has a fixed price, a fixed end date, and a deliverable your board can read. We staff senior practitioners only — the person who scopes your work is the person who builds it. Most clients start with Learn or Plan. Any door is fine.

Learn

Get your people fluent

From $275–450 75–90 minutes

Individual AI Workshops

One-to-one and small-group sessions for professionals, executives, senior specialists, and just about anyone who needs working fluency. This is not a webinar; we focus on your specific documents and needs, helping you automate a real task from your week. No prior experience needed; bring your curiosity.

  • Tailored to your role, tools, and live work
  • Prompt and workflow patterns you keep
  • Thirty days of follow-up support
From $1,300–3,900 Half day – two days

Corporate AI Training & Bootcamps

Structured programmes for whole teams, in cohorts of five to twenty. Streamed by role, assessed at the end, and built on your own systems rather than generic examples, so capability lands where the work actually happens.

  • Role-streamed curriculum for leaders and practitioners
  • Hands-on labs on your data and tooling
  • Competency assessment and internal champion track

Plan

Find what pays for itself

From $3,000–15,900 4 weeks

AI Readiness Audit

A four-week diagnostic across data, infrastructure, governance, and team capability. You get a scored baseline, a ranked list of what is blocking you, and a candid view of which ambitions are eighteen months out. Often the cheapest engagement a board ever approves.

  • Scored readiness baseline across four domains
  • Data and infrastructure gap register
  • Governance and risk posture review
Scoped after a call 4–6 weeks

AI Strategy & Roadmapping

We inventory every candidate use case across your operating units, score them on value, feasibility, and regulatory exposure, then sequence the survivors into a costed twelve-month roadmap. You leave with a plan finance will fund, not a slide deck.

  • Opportunity portfolio & value model
  • Build / buy / partner recommendation per use case
  • Costed sequencing plan with staffing profile

Build

Put it into production

Scoped after readiness 4–12 weeks

Workflow Automation

Document-heavy, rules-heavy processes are where AI pays back fastest. We map the real workflow — including the exceptions nobody documented — and rebuild it as a hybrid of deterministic tooling and language models, with a human in the loop where the risk warrants one.

  • Process mining & exception mapping
  • Automation built and integrated in your stack
  • Throughput, accuracy, and cost baselines
Scoped after readiness 3–12 weeks

Custom AI Agent Development

Retrieval and tool-using agents that operate against your systems of record, not a demo dataset. Every agent ships with an evaluation suite, guardrails, observability, and a rollback path — the parts that determine whether it survives contact with real users.

  • Agent architecture & tool integration
  • Evaluation harness and regression suite
  • Deployment, monitoring, and handover training

All prices are in USD. The readiness audit range depends on business units and market segments.

Where to start

Pick the door that matches your situation.

New to this and don’t want to fall behind

→Individual workshop

Leadership team that keeps hearing about AI and can’t tell what’s real

→Team bootcamp

Tried something, it stalled, you don’t know why

→Readiness audit

You already know what you want built

→Straight to Build

02 — About

Ahmed Mapara, Founder and Principal Consultant at Biruni Applied AI
Ahmed Mapara — Principal

Twenty years building and servicing products where being wrong is expensive.

Ahmed Mapara founded Biruni Applied AI in Toronto in 2026. He is a senior product manager who has taken RAG and LLM systems into production and carried portfolios worth more than $20M across CIRO, PwC, and TD Bank Financial Group. That includes trading systems where downtime moves money and regulatory platforms where auditors read the requirements line by line.

“I build products where being wrong is expensive. AI systems where one bad answer erodes user trust on day one. That’s been my lane for 20+ years, and the discipline transfers everywhere.”

That discipline is what Biruni Applied AI sells. Every engagement is led by the same person who has had to defend a system to a regulator, an auditor, and a trading desk, through advisory work and through the workshops and bootcamps that leave your own team able to run it.

How the work gets delivered

All capabilities are genuinely delivered either directly, through the founder-principal and senior practitioners, or through partners in a vetted specialist network. That network covers the engineering, data engineering, security, and production support the work requires. Our practitioners have delivered inside financial services (insurance and capital markets), regulatory bodies, Big Four consulting, statewide infrastructure, public sector institutions, and government agencies.

Every specialist works under our contract, our NDA, and our insurance. You have one counterparty: Biruni Applied AI.

Based in
Toronto, Ontario
Career & credentials
Twenty years in technology, built inside CIRO, PwC, Info-Tech Research Group, TD Bank Financial Group, and Canada Life.
  • MBA
  • Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO®) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM®)
  • Google Generative AI Leader Specialization and Google Cloud Digital Leader
  • Claude (AI) Certified Architect — in progress
Sectors
Capital markets, insurance, finance, regulation, retail, manufacturing, professional services, research and academia

03 — Insights

Recent Insights

All writing →
Analytics dashboard on a laptop screen showing operating performance data
Adoption

Why so many AI pilots never reach production

The failure almost never happens in the model. It happens at the handover, when a pilot owned by innovation has to become a system owned by operations — and nobody funded that transition.

Read more
Close-up of code on a monitor, representing agent instrumentation and evaluation
Engineering

The agent evaluation stack: what to measure before you ship

Accuracy on a golden set tells you almost nothing about an agent that takes actions. Here are the six layers we instrument on every build, and the thresholds we hold before a release goes live.

Read more
Chess pieces on a board, representing a build, buy, or wait decision
Strategy

Buy, build, or wait: a decision framework for AI capability

Three questions decide it: does this capability differentiate you, does the data sit inside your walls, and will the vendor market commoditise it within eighteen months? Everything else is noise.

Read more

04 — FAQ

Questions we are asked before every engagement

What does an AI consulting firm actually deliver?

Biruni Applied AI delivers six engagements: a scored readiness baseline covering data, infrastructure, governance, and team capability; individual AI workshops for executives and senior specialists; corporate AI training and bootcamps for whole functions; a prioritised AI roadmap tied to financial outcomes; automated production workflows; and custom AI agents deployed inside your own stack. Every engagement is fixed-scope with named deliverables.

How long does a typical AI engagement take?

Individual workshops run 75 to 90 minutes. Corporate training and bootcamps run half a day to two days. A readiness audit runs four weeks, strategy and roadmapping four to six. Automation runs four to twelve weeks and custom agent builds three to twelve, depending on integration depth, with a working system in production inside the first five weeks.

Do you work with companies that have no existing AI capability?

Yes. Most of the companies we work with begin with no machine learning team. The readiness audit exists for exactly that case: it establishes what is feasible now, what needs data or infrastructure work first, and what should be bought rather than built.

Who owns the systems and models you build?

You do. All code, prompts, evaluation suites, and documentation are delivered into your repositories and cloud accounts. Biruni Applied AI retains no licence and charges no ongoing platform fee.

What is the difference between an individual workshop and a corporate bootcamp?

A workshop is one principal and one to six people for a single 75- to 90-minute session, built around the specific work in front of them. A bootcamp is a half-day to two-day programme for a whole team of five to twenty people, streamed by role, with hands-on labs, assessment, and an internal champion track so the capability survives after we leave.

Do you run AI training remotely or on site?

Both. Individual workshops run equally well over video. Bootcamps are usually hybrid: on-site kickoff and closing sessions, remote labs in between, with cohorts split across time zones where needed. All materials, recordings, and lab environments are handed over to you afterwards.

Does training require any technical background?

No. Programmes are streamed by role: an executive track covering judgement, risk, and where to invest; a practitioner track for analysts and operators working hands-on with their own tools; and an engineering track for teams who will build and maintain systems. Nobody needs to write code to get value from the first two.

What industries does Biruni Applied AI work in?

Financial services, insurance, healthcare operations, logistics, and industrial manufacturing — sectors where workflows are document-heavy, regulated, and expensive to staff.

05 — Booking

Thirty minutes with the person who would run your engagement.

No sales engineer, no discovery deck. Bring the workflow you think is broken and Ahmed will tell you on the call whether AI is the right instrument for it — including when the answer is no.

Schedule a discovery call → Typical reply within one business day

06 — Contact

Tell us what you are trying to fix.

Every message is read by a principal, not an inbox. If we are not the right firm for the work, we will say so and point you somewhere better.

Where we work
Greater Toronto Area. Remote across Canada and the US.
What happens next
  1. 01
    One business day

    A principal reads your message and replies. No routing, no qualification call with someone who cannot answer questions.

  2. 02
    A 30-minute call

    We talk through the workflow or the team you want trained, and what you have tried already.

  3. 03
    A written scope

    If the work makes sense, you get duration, price, and deliverables in writing. If it does not, we tell you that instead.

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