AI systems studio

AI systems for the way your industry works.

We design and build the harness around the model — the tools, guardrails, and approval gates that turn general-purpose AI into working software for your field.

Book a Strategy Session See our work

$500 · 60 minutes · credited in full toward your first engagement

Our position

The model is a commodity.
The harness is the product.

Models change monthly; the workflow around them is what your team touches every day. We build that layer — model-agnostic by design — so a model deprecation is a config change, not a rewrite.

  • 27 domain tools in one production harness
  • 4 AI providers, switchable live
  • <2s to parse a screenplay, integration-tested
  • 13 approval-gated email templates in one copilot
  • 900+ patients a week on FHIR platforms we architected

Facts about the systems we've shipped, verifiable from the code — not adjectives about ourselves.

Anatomy of a harness

What we mean by "harness"

Your work goes in. The harness gives the model typed tools, domain knowledge, and guardrails; a person approves anything that sends or spends; every action lands in an append-only audit log. The model underneath is swappable — Claude, GPT, Gemini, or Grok — without touching the workflow.

What we build

Three ways we work with you

  1. Custom AI harnesses for your industry

    The layer that makes a general model safe and specific to your work: typed, schema-validated tool contracts, domain knowledge, human approval gates, and audit trails. When an off-the-shelf model isn't enough, we train and fine-tune models on Vertex AI.

  2. Agentic workflow consulting

    Agents that take real actions in your business, with a person approving every consequential step. We'll also tell you when agents are the wrong answer — we've torn out a multi-agent architecture we built ourselves because a simpler one was more reliable.

  3. Healthcare technology consulting

    Where Four Boots started, and the standard everything else is held to: FHIR platform architecture, Epic and Cerner integration, clinical AI, and HIPAA/SOC 2 compliance.

Also: Startup Growth Studio — content and lead generation by human creatives, with governed agents doing the research.

Recent work

Shipped systems, described specifically

A screenplay in, a wardrobe department's week out

For a major streaming studio's TV production: script breakdowns in under two seconds, fabric-specified shopping briefs, continuity alerts, and customs manifests from photos of packed cases — 27 domain tools in harness.

Read the wardrobe harness case study

The copilot that opens with "3 candidates are stuck"

For a recruiting firm: an AI-native applicant tracking system that starts every morning with what matters, drafts the chase emails, and sends nothing without one-click human approval.

Read the recruiting copilot case study

All case studies

How we work

Fixed scope, human approval, no lock-in

  1. Strategy Session. $500, 60 minutes, credited in full toward any engagement. Within 2 business days you get a written brief: what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it should cost.
  2. Fixed-scope sprint. A 2–3 week engagement with fixed deliverables, priced up front. No open-ended discovery billing.
  3. Build. Typed tool contracts, approval gates on anything that sends or spends, append-only audit logs, and a test suite that makes the demo repeatable instead of lucky.
  4. Run. An ongoing retainer if you want us to keep evolving the system as models change.

More on our process and engineering defaults

The team

Real humans, in the loop

Four Boots is senior engineers and product designers — including ex-Google UX engineers — working alongside AI agents we keep in harness. AI drafts, parses, and researches; people design, decide, and approve what ships. If content looks AI-generated, it doesn't go out.

More about Four Boots

Start with a Strategy Session

$500 · 60 minutes · credited in full toward your first engagement.

No free sales call — this is a working session with the people who will build your system. Come with a workflow you want automated, an AI project that stalled, or a healthcare platform decision you need to get right. You leave with a written brief within 2 business days, and a clear yes or no on whether AI is even the right tool for your problem.

Book your Strategy Session

Prefer email first? Contact us — no charge to ask whether a session makes sense.