AI FAQ: Straight Answers for Enterprise AI Buyers
This AI FAQ answers the questions enterprise teams ask most when scoping AI projects — covering strategy, security, deployment, and ROI. demelos updates this AI FAQ quarterly from real client conversations so the answers reflect what production AI actually requires.
New to the process? Start with a free AI audit, then map next steps with our AI strategy roadmap.
Why AI FAQ matters in 2026
Enterprise AI moved from pilots to production, and this AI FAQ exists because the same questions surface in every scoping call — what is safe to deploy, what it costs, and how fast it ships. We keep this AI FAQ grounded in real client work so the answers reflect production reality, not vendor hype. Start with a free AI audit if you want a baseline before reading further.
What you get from demelos
Beyond this AI FAQ, demelos pairs every engagement with security review, audit logging, and role-based access so AI ships without widening your attack surface. Each answer below maps to a service you can act on — explore the full set on our AI services page.
How AI FAQ fits into your roadmap
Use this AI FAQ as a checklist, then turn it into a sequenced plan with our AI strategy roadmap. We pilot first, measure ROI, then expand — so the answers in this AI FAQ become milestones rather than open questions.
Industry Sources
For regulatory guidance, consult the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which informs many of the security and governance answers in this AI FAQ.
Real answers. No hype.
50 questions about how demelos works — process, pricing, speed, models, hosting, security, and the things every prospect asks before they sign.
Discovery call → opportunity map → scoped roadmap. We fix scope, timeline, and budget before any code is written. No surprises mid-flight.
Free 30-min audit. We learn your workflows, pain points, and success metrics. You walk away with an opportunity map even if we don't move forward.
Yes. Mutual NDA before discovery is standard. We work with your custom NDA template if you have one.
Both. We prefer fixed-scope sprints with clear deliverables. T&M available for ongoing maintenance and exploratory work.
You do. Full source goes to your repository, no vendor lock-in, no hidden licensing. Fork it, audit it, take it elsewhere — your call.
Your cloud, your servers, your accounts — or fully on demelos infrastructure if you'd rather we host everything. Your call.
Most production AI systems in 4–6 weeks end-to-end. Simple integrations and proof-of-concepts in days. Enterprise rollouts 8–12 weeks.
Week 1. Always. We don't believe in months of "requirements gathering" before you see something working.
Daily Slack updates. Weekly demos. Code in your repository continuously — you can pull and run it at any time.
Within 48 hours of a signed scope. Sometimes same day for urgent engagements.
Yes, with surge pricing. We've shipped to production in 5 days when the situation demanded it.
Sprints from $5k. Production AI systems typically $25k–$120k. Enterprise multi-system engagements run six figures. Pricing is fixed once scope is signed.
50% upfront, 50% on delivery for fixed-scope work. Net-15 invoicing for enterprise. Monthly retainers for ongoing work.
Optional T&M at $125/hour for ongoing maintenance, tuning, and exploratory work after launch.
All engineering, design, testing, deployment, integrations, and 30 days of post-launch support. No surprise add-ons.
Yes. Monthly retainers for ongoing AI ops, prompt tuning, model monitoring, and incremental builds. From $3k/month.
$500/month minimum for ongoing maintenance — covers monitoring, light bug fixes, dependency updates, and a single point of contact when something breaks.
Yes. Full managed hosting on demelos infrastructure — provisioning, scaling, monitoring, backups, SSL, and uptime SLAs all included. You don't have to touch a server.
Inbound + outbound calls with real-time STT/TTS. Vapi, Retell, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, or fully custom on your stack. Phone trees, intake, scheduling, sales follow-up.
RAG over your documents, multi-turn, brand-aligned, deployed to web/Slack/Teams/Discord/WhatsApp. Guardrails, citation, escalation built in.
n8n, Zapier, Make, Temporal, or custom orchestration with LLM steps. Connect 200+ SaaS tools. Human-in-the-loop where it matters.
Invoice, contract, claim, ID, and form extraction. OCR + LLM + structured output. Confidence scores, exception routing, full audit trail.
Forecasting, churn modeling, anomaly detection, demand sensing. Classical ML when it fits, deep learning when it earns it.
Role-specific assistants for sales, support, ops, legal, finance, HR. Loaded with your playbooks, deployed on ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Projects, or self-hosted.
24/7 inbound voice + SMS. Calendar booking, CRM logging, lead qualification, FAQ handling. Multilingual.
iOS + Android with AI features baked in — voice, vision, personalization, intelligent notifications. Native or cross-platform.
Next.js, Astro, or custom stacks with AI search, dynamic content, agent-driven UX. Optimized for both Google and AI Overviews.
All of them. GPT-5, GPT-4o, Claude 4 Opus/Sonnet/Haiku, Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash, Llama 4, Mistral Large, Grok-3, DeepSeek V3, Command R+, Qwen, Phi-3. We pick per use case.
Yes. Llama 4, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, Phi self-hosted on your GPU cluster. vLLM, TGI, Ollama, llama.cpp deployments.
DALL-E 3, Midjourney API, Stable Diffusion XL/3, Flux.1 Pro/Schnell, Imagen 3, Recraft V3, Ideogram. We pick by style + license needs.
ElevenLabs (best-in-class TTS), OpenAI TTS, Deepgram and AssemblyAI for STT, Whisper for transcription, Suno for music, Cartesia for low-latency real-time voice.
Sora, Runway Gen-4, Pika 2.0, Luma Dream Machine, Kling, Hailuo. We integrate via API or build custom pipelines around them.
OpenAI text-embedding-3, Cohere Embed, Voyage AI for embeddings. Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus, Chroma, pgvector for storage. Per-tenant or shared.
Yes. LoRA, QLoRA, full fine-tunes, RLHF, DPO. Hosted on OpenAI, Anthropic, Together, Fireworks, or your own infra.
AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, Cloudflare, Vercel, Fly.io, Render, Railway, DigitalOcean — your account, your bill, your control. Or fully managed on demelos servers if you'd rather we handle everything.
Provisioning, scaling, monitoring, daily backups, SSL certificates, security patches, uptime SLAs, and incident response. One invoice, zero infrastructure work on your side.
Yes. Air-gapped deployments supported. Llama, Mistral, and other open-source models on your hardware behind your firewall.
Cloudflare Workers AI, Vercel AI SDK Edge, Replicate, Fastly Compute. Sub-100ms latency at the edge for low-cost, high-volume inference.
Lambda Labs, RunPod, CoreWeave, Vast.ai, Modal, Together AI, Fireworks AI. Or your own H100/A100/L40S cluster. We size to load.
HIPAA-compliant AWS, GCP, Azure environments. SOC2-aligned controls. EU/UK/Canada data residency. Air-gapped govcloud regions when required.
Full submission lifecycle: TestFlight beta, App Review prep, in-app purchases + subscriptions, privacy manifest, App Store optimization.
Internal, closed, and open testing tracks. Play Console submission, in-app billing, data safety section, Play Integrity API.
React Native + Expo, Flutter, Capacitor, or native (Swift, Kotlin) when the use case demands it. We pick based on team and performance.
Yes. Core ML on iOS, ML Kit on Android, MediaPipe, ONNX Runtime, llama.cpp on-device for small models. Privacy-preserving inference where it fits.
No. Your data never trains any base model. Per-tenant isolation. We use enterprise API endpoints with zero data retention where available (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).
HIPAA, GDPR, SOC2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP-aligned. We ship to whatever your security team requires.
Redaction, tokenization, encryption at rest + in transit, customer-managed keys (BYO-KMS), differential privacy when relevant. Detection-then-mask in prompts.
Yes. Every prompt, response, model version, latency, and cost — logged and queryable. Helps with debugging, billing, and compliance audits.
Input filtering, output validation, structured output schemas, separate trust zones for tool calls, allow-list policies. Red-team testing before launch.
30 days bundled. After that, monthly retainers or extended SLAs. 24/7 incident response available for production systems.
Quarterly check-ins, automatic metric monitoring, retraining when accuracy or business metrics drift past thresholds. Always your call to deploy.
Production blockers: same-day. P1 issues: 24 hours. Non-blockers: 48 hours. Hard SLAs available with enterprise retainers.
Yes. 1-day, 3-day, and role-specific workshops. AI literacy for executives, prompt engineering for ops, RAG architecture for engineers.
Yes. We translate AI possibility into operator language — what it costs, what it earns, what it breaks. No jargon required.
"Build me an AGI." "Replace 100 people next month." "AI will fix our product-market fit." We work on measurable outcomes — not silver bullets.
We commit to clear ROI targets in the scope. If we miss, we keep going at no extra cost until we hit them or you tell us to stop.
Ask the founder directly.
Book the free 30-min audit. We'll answer anything and map your first AI opportunity in the same call.
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