The people behind your AI software
We started in 2019 with one question: why do most AI projects fail before they reach production? Five years later, we think we know the answer, and we have built a company around fixing it.
How we got here
Core Expert AI began as a two-person consultancy run out of a shared office in Edinburgh. Our founders, Isla Drummond and Callum Yuen, had both spent years inside large consultancies watching promising AI pilots get shelved. The reasons were almost always the same: the models were built in isolation from the teams who would use them, the data was messier than anyone admitted during the pitch, and the project scope ballooned until no one could say what success looked like.
So they set a few rules. Keep teams small. Deliver something usable inside a month. Say no when the data is not ready rather than billing for months of cleanup. Those rules still hold.
Today we are a team of eleven: six engineers, two data scientists, a designer, a project lead and an office manager. We have delivered 43 production AI systems for clients in logistics, manufacturing, financial services and e-commerce. Not every project went perfectly, but every one shipped.
What we care about
These are not slogans on a poster. They are the habits we check ourselves against every Friday in our retrospective.
Honesty about feasibility
If your data cannot support the model you want, we will tell you in the audit, not three months into a contract. In 2023 we turned down four projects because the data quality was not there. Two of those clients came back after cleaning their pipelines, and we built something useful for them the second time around.
Speed over polish
A working prototype that answers a real question beats a polished slide deck every time. We aim for four-week delivery cycles. The longest project we have run took eleven weeks, and that included integrating with a legacy ERP system from 2007.
Explainability
We do not hand over a black box. Every model ships with documentation that shows which features drive predictions, how confidence scores are calculated, and where the model is likely to be wrong. Your team should be able to challenge the output, not just trust it.
Fair pricing
We charge fixed fees per project phase, agreed before work starts. If the scope changes, we renegotiate openly. There are no surprise invoices and no hourly billing that rewards slow work.
Meet the team
Small enough to know every client by name. Large enough to run two projects in parallel without cutting corners.
Isla Drummond
Co-founder and technical lead
Isla spent eight years at a Big Four consultancy building NLP pipelines before deciding she wanted to ship products, not reports. She leads architecture decisions and reviews every model before it goes to production.
Callum Yuen
Co-founder and client lead
Callum runs scoping calls, manages timelines and translates between business language and engineering language. Before Core Expert AI, he managed data teams at two Edinburgh fintech firms.
Amara Okafor
Senior data scientist
Amara joined in 2021 after finishing her PhD in applied statistics at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in time-series forecasting and has built demand-prediction models for three of our largest logistics clients.
Milestones
A short history, because we would rather build than reminisce.
2019: Founded in Edinburgh
Isla and Callum registered the company, rented a desk in a co-working space, and landed their first client within six weeks: a food distributor that needed better demand forecasts for perishable goods.
2020: First full-time hire
Amara joined as employee number three. The team moved to a small office on Leith Walk and completed seven projects that year, all in the logistics and supply-chain space.
2021: Expanded into document processing
A financial services client asked us to automate invoice matching. That project became the foundation of our document extraction pipeline, which now handles contracts, compliance forms and purchase orders.
2022: Team grew to eight
We hired three more engineers and a UX designer. Revenue crossed £600k. We also delivered our first conversational agent for a retail client with 12,000 monthly support tickets.
2024: Relocated to Littel Common
The team moved to a larger office in Scotland. We now serve clients across the UK and have started working with two European manufacturers. The team stands at eleven people.
Ready to talk about your project?
Book a free 45-minute scoping call. We will tell you honestly whether AI can solve your problem and what it would cost.
Get in touchWhere to find us
Address: United Kingdom, Scotland, Littel Common, GZ3 9ZW, 8 Becker Drove
Phone: +44 7832 535615
Email: [email protected]