Forward-deployed AI engineering

Turn AI from a buzzword into a system that ships

Whether you’re still asking “what could AI even do for us?” or pushing a stalled pilot over the line, Smartisan embeds engineers directly inside your team to carry AI from idea to production — the architecture, the infrastructure, and the adoption work that pilots usually skip.

Led by Dr. Yan Huang — federated learning researcher, 30+ publications, NSF & NSA principal investigator.

Input Retrieval Model Routing Eval Gate Pass Needs Review Human Review Approved Production
Where AI helps

Not sure where AI fits? Start here.

You don’t need an AI strategy to get value — you need one workflow that wastes hours every week. These are the places small and mid-sized teams usually see returns first, using the systems you already have.

Customer Support

Answer routine questions automatically

An assistant trained on your products and policies drafts replies and resolves the repetitive 80% — your team keeps the exceptions.

Back Office

Turn paperwork into data

Invoices, orders, and contracts read and entered into your systems automatically — instead of hours of retyping and reconciliation.

Sales & Marketing

Draft, personalize, follow up

Proposals, outreach, and product copy generated from your own materials, in your voice, in a fraction of the time.

Knowledge

Ask your own documents

A private assistant over manuals, policies, and past projects — so answers stop living in one veteran employee’s head.

Operations

Forecast demand and staffing

Your sales history turned into forward-looking signals for inventory, scheduling, and purchasing decisions.

Quality

Catch defects before they ship

Vision models watch the line and flag anomalies early — less rework, fewer returns.

Recognize one of these? Tell us what eats your team’s time → A short conversation is enough to scope whether it’s worth automating.

The gap

Building a model is the easy part.

Pilots are built to prove an idea works once. Production has to work every day, on real data, in front of people whose jobs depend on trusting it. That gap is where most AI initiatives quietly stop.

Data

Data plumbing

Pilots run on cleaned, hand-picked samples. Production runs on your actual systems — inconsistent schemas, latency limits, and access controls no one accounted for in the demo.

Infra

Infrastructure

A notebook that runs on a laptop is not a service. Serving, monitoring, retraining, and rollback all have to exist before anyone can rely on it.

Adoption

Adoption

The best model is worthless if the team that has to use it doesn’t trust or understand it. Deployment is as much a people problem as an engineering one.

Services

Where we work

Engagements are scoped to the stage you’re actually at — from a first honest assessment to an engineer sitting inside your sprint cycle until the system ships.

Assessment

AI Readiness & Architecture Review

An honest technical audit of what you have, what’s missing, and what it will actually take to reach production — before you commit budget to it.

FDE Model

Embedded Deployment Engineering

We sit inside your team, in your codebase and your sprint cycle, and do the unglamorous work of turning a prototype into a system people rely on.

Specialty

Federated & Privacy-Preserving ML

For organizations that can’t centralize their data — multi-site, multi-tenant, or regulated environments — built on research-grade federated learning architecture.

Reliability

MLOps & Production Hardening

Monitoring, retraining pipelines, rollback plans, and the operational guardrails that turn a demo into infrastructure.

Enablement

Technical Advisory & Team Enablement

We leave your team more capable than we found it — documentation, training, and architecture decisions your engineers can maintain without us.

Training

Employee AI Training

Hands-on workshops for your whole staff, not just engineers — how to use AI tools effectively, when to trust them, and how to build reliable AI workflows into everyday work.

How we engage

Four stages, one accountable engineer.

No handoffs between a sales team and a delivery team. The person who scopes the engagement is the person who ships it.

01

Discovery

A 1–2 week technical assessment of your current AI initiative, data, and infrastructure — with a direct answer on whether it’s ready to scale.

02

Embed

Our engineer joins your team, on-site or remote, working inside your existing tools, repos, and process — not alongside them.

03

Build

We ship in increments. Progress is a working system in production, reviewed by your team — not a slide deck.

04

Handoff

Documentation, training, and a maintenance plan, so the system outlives the engagement.

Led by

Research-grade rigor, applied to production systems.

Smartisan is led by Dr. Yan Huang, Associate Professor of Software Engineering at Kennesaw State University, where his research on personalized federated learning — architectures and aggregation algorithms for training across distributed, non-uniform data — has been cited more than 1,100 times in the past two years alone.

He has published 30+ papers in venues including Neural Networks and IEEE/ACM transactions, served as Principal Investigator on NSF- and NSA-funded programs. That same discipline — building systems that hold up outside a controlled environment — is what Smartisan brings to every engagement.

Fewer clients, worked closely: every engagement is led personally, not routed through a bench of junior consultants.

30+Publications in
peer-reviewed venues
1,100+Citations, federated
learning, 2 yrs
NSF / NSAPrincipal
Investigator
Get in touch

Tell us where your AI project is stuck.

Whether you’re weighing your first AI initiative or you have a pilot that’s stalled before production, a short message is enough to start. We read every message personally and reply within 2 business days.

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