AI Development & Integration
Every industry is being rebuilt by AI. We can help you lead the rebuild
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What we do
AI services
Internal copilots, content pipelines and workflow boosters that multiply team output.
Connect AI models to your own tools and data through MCP, the open standard that lets an assistant read from and act in the systems your team already uses.
Chain specialized agents to tackle complex tasks with minimal human glue-code.
Fuse private data with LLM power for answers grounded in your own knowledge base.
When off-the-shelf isn't enough, we customize models to your domain language and guardrails.
Replace rigid rule-based systems with intelligent AI workflows that adapt to context, handle edge cases, and make decisions based on your business domain.
Have an AI-generated prototype or proof of concept? We transform rapid prototypes and vibe-coded artifacts into production-grade applications. Whether it started as a Claude artifact or a weekend hackathon project, our team engineers it into secure, scalable software ready for real-world deployment. We handle the architecture and security hardening, then the performance work and infrastructure that separate a compelling demo from enterprise-ready software.
Innovation
AI-forward by default
Our team keeps building production RAG systems, chatbots, agent orchestrations, and more, while continuously researching what's next. We test emerging capabilities in dedicated sandboxes and use AI to accelerate our own development processes, learning what works under real-world conditions. As the tooling changes, we refine both what we build and how we build it, balancing innovation with responsibility. The result is proven AI work and battle-tested development practices that move as fast as the technology does, without dedicating your own staff to staying current.
Speed
Prototype fast, launch faster
See what's possible in weeks rather than quarters. We spin up proof-of-concepts, validate with users and harden what works into production-ready features. This will get you revenue and product-market fit sooner.
“The way you've handled this is such a testament to why HQ is so damn good.”
Elizabeth Waite
CMO, Collegewise
“This team is insanely reliable.”
Randall Bennett
“These are my favorite vendors.”
Hayden Hill
CMO, Christensen Institute
“As a way to get to a phenomenal product, hiring this team is the best way to go. Overall we're 1000% pleased.”
Austen Allred
CEO, GauntletAI
“There's no doubt in my mind that we picked the right partner in HQ to help us with this.”
Shobin Uralil
CMO, Lively
“If I'm not your happiest customer, I'm willing to fight whoever thinks they are for that title.”
Jeff Allen
CEO, BlueCar
“We feel like HQ has been our secret weapon.”
Jeron Paul
CEO, Spiff (acq. by Salesforce)
Hear it from more of our clients
See our wall of loveWe obsess about client experience
Many of our clients come to us because they had a bad experience with a previous agency or hire. We care about exceptional user experience in the products that we build, but also in the long-term partnership and process of building them.
Read about our processAt HQ, we've structured our company and client relationships to eliminate barriers between you and the individuals responsible for the actual work. This approach results in reduced information loss, faster feedback loops, and the innovative insights that arise when a diverse group collaborates on a single product.
We're working on your product, so you set the priorities and can follow progress closely. We'll keep you updated on the progress of each task, work with you to refine product requirements, and help translate your vision into concrete work.
We want you to be confident that the resources you invest in us are used effectively and efficiently. To achieve this, we provide regular updates on the budget and invoice frequently. Additionally, with each invoice, we include a report detailing each time entry logged by each individual working on your project. This ensures transparency and accountability.
We balance face-to-face and async communication to fit each project's needs. The more we collaborate, the better the results, and we make a point to communicate early and often. Expect proactive updates, quick responses, and transparent dialogue throughout the process.
Hiring fast for big pushes or keeping teams busy during slower seasons can be a challenge. With our flexible team, you can ramp up momentum or scale back as needed. We adapt to your business rhythms so you never pay for idle time or scramble for extra hands.
Our work requires continuous learning and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Every project benefits from the collective expertise of our designers and developers, not just the individuals assigned to it. Behind every deliverable is an entire team sharing insights, tools, and best practices.
Frequently asked questions
We benchmark multiple vendors against your data and latency/price targets, then wrap the winner in an abstraction so you're not locked in.
Usually not. We start with managed inference (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, etc.) and add dedicated infrastructure only when ROI is clear.
Yes. We treat AI as a service layer (REST/GraphQL endpoints, background workers or SDK hooks), so your current stack stays intact.
How we approach AI development and integration
Most organizations exploring AI hit the same wall: demos work, production doesn't. A chatbot that impressed in a sandbox starts hallucinating in front of customers. An automation that looked simple turns out to depend on data that isn't clean, in a format that isn't consistent, flowing through a system that wasn't designed for it. The gap between proof of concept and production-ready is where most AI projects stall.
We've built production AI systems across RAG pipelines, multi-agent orchestration, LLM-powered business logic, and workflow automation. We benchmark models against your actual data and latency requirements. We wrap inference in clean abstractions so you're not locked to a single provider when the models change. And we build the observability in from the start, so you know when something goes wrong and why.
We also take prototype productionization seriously. Many teams have something that works locally, a Claude artifact, a weekend hackathon, a vibe-coded proof of concept. We know how to take that raw signal and harden it into something that holds up under real users and real security requirements.
The outcome is AI that saves measurable time: faster internal workflows and smarter product features, built on systems that improve as models do, without requiring your team to re-engineer everything from scratch each time.
HQ builds AI into working software. That includes internal copilots and workflow automation, plus retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that answers questions from a company's own documents. HQ also builds multi-agent systems and trains models on a client's own domain language when an off-the-shelf model falls short.
For Identifyd, a recruiting platform, HQ designed and built an AI prospect search that takes a role description and returns ranked candidates, along with a knowledge base agent that answers questions from Identifyd's own material. For BodyAudit, a preventive health platform, HQ built a dashboard that turns at-home biomarker tests and wearable data into AI-generated summaries and recommendations.
HQ usually starts on managed models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock and adds dedicated infrastructure only when the return is clear. HQ also rebuilds AI-generated prototypes, such as a ChatGPT experiment or a weekend hackathon project, into secure production software a business can run on.
Let's build together
We help organizations move from early AI exploration to measurable impact. Whether your industry is just starting to adopt AI or needs help scaling it, we build the infrastructure to make it real.
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