Technology transfer


Goal

You are aware that integrating AI into your products, services or processes is an opportunity to give you a competitive edge or a necessity not to be outdone by your competitors.

You wish to minimize your risks, efficiently set up an operational solution, minimize your costs, quickly acquire new skills, we offer you a technology transfer.

Our competence is threefold, revealing AI opportunities, developing reliable and effective AI solutions and assisting you in their integration into your operational system.

This transfer take advantage of our experience and knowledge of the scientific state of the art. We have been working together for more than 5 years and have developed algorithms to address a wide variety of AI problems. These algorithms are based on open source resources from the scientific community. We develop our solutions in our data center and deploy them on your infrastructure or on the main cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure…).

We transfer you the source code of our solution under licence, allowing you to benefit from our past developments and our patents, while keeping our intellectual property safe and accumulating it. This licence gives you full right to use, modify and maintain our algorithms, the only restriction is on the distribution of the sources. Naturally, your data and models that were built using your data are your exclusive property.


Approach

Development is done in two phases which give rise to two propositions: the building of a Proof of Concept, the integration of the AI solution in your operational system.

When building the PoC we take on the role of project manager while the client assumes the role of project owner. If our client as difficulties defining its project we can help him do so during this phase, but once the project has begun we will solely focus on our role as makers.

During the integration phases our role can be very diverse: it can be limited to facilitating the technology transfer to our client, up to managing the whole integration project. It all depends on the will and needs of the client.

1 Building the Proof of Concept

Our approach is based on agile development. Agile development allows the client to follow the solution’s progress through sprints, each sprint lasting less than a month and providing actionable and verifiable results.

Our experience has allowed us to standardize our Agile development cycle through clearly identified sprints.

Sprint 0 : Defining a useful and feasible project

Together, we asses your artificial intelligence project.
If your project seems appropriate and achievable, we directly make you a Proof of Concept. Our PoCs are based on prototypes which process real data and which allow us to measure operational performance. Prototypes differ from operational systems mainly because they forego integration constraints.
If your project hasn’t fully matured, we can offer you the necessary guidance to help you shape it before we can make a PoC offer.
This step is crucial in helping reduce your risks and ours.

Sprint 1 : Prototype definition

During this sprint we collect and study your data. We run experiments to select the most appropriate algorithms. We define the PoC’s functions. We define with you how the prototype should be evaluated. We determine if a beta testing phase is needed and how it should be carried out.

Sprint 2.x : Prototype implementation and testing

Depending on the complexity of the prototype this can span across multiple sprints. In practice, a sprint doesn’t last more than a month.

Sprint 3 : Evaluation and beta testing

We subject the PoC to an impartial assessment. If a beta testing phase has been planned, it is carried out and analyzed.
At the end of this phase, the proof of concept is established and we can, based on performance, define the integration of the AI solution into the operational system.

Sprint 4 : Technology transfer

During this sprint we document and package the source code to facilitate its transfer.

As an exemple, following are the durations for the IdMatch project:

Step Duration Effort
Sprint 0 0 days 0 days
Sprint 1 10 days 5 days
Sprint 2.1 20 days 15 days
Sprint 3 5 days 5 days
Sprint 4 5 days 3 days
Total 40 days 28 days

2 Integrating the AI ​​solution into the operational system

Depending on the needs and wishes of the client, we can take on different roles during the integration.
Following are the different services we can provide:

Facilitate the technology transfer

Once the PoC is done we transfer the source code of the prototype to the client. The client can thus ensure the integration of the AI solutions into the operational system himself. We can facilitate this transfer by providing documentation, training, or assistance on integration tasks.

Client guidance

If our client entrusts the integration of the operational system to a third party project manager, we can provide guidance for the parts related to the integration of the AI ​​solution.

Integrator of our solution

We can integrate our AI solution under the authority of a project manager, whether it be the client or a third-party company.

Project management

Finally, we can carry out the project management for the operational system. We have experience doing so on large operational systems, managing our own resources, external resources or those of our client.


Pricing

All of our service provisions are quoted in man-days.
We have two pricing structures, one for contracts under 20 days and one for contracts to go over 20 days.

Service provision pricing for contracts under 20 days
Service Price per day
AI Expert 750 € HT
Training by an AI expert 2250 € HT
Specialized annotator 300 € HT
Service provision pricing for contracts over 20 days
Service Price per day
AI expert 700 € HT
Training by an AI expert 2040 € HT
Specialized annotator 300 € HT

In truth, our pricing is as follows: junior AI expert 550 €, senior AI expert 750 €, project leader 800 €. We work in team.The daily price of 700 € is a team price compound of different qualifications.
We ask for travel expenses to be reimbursed if we provide supporting documents.
An advance of a 30% of the price of the sprint is asked at the begining of sprint, the sold is payed at the ending of sprint.

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