AI consulting for UK firms
Be specific about what AI does for your firm.
Be Specific is an AI consultancy run by operators who have built, certified and scaled companies of their own. We name the tools worth enabling, rebuild the process that holds your team back, and prove the result in your numbers.
We work with investment and knowledge-work firms, regulated businesses, and companies building AI itself.
How we engage
Engagements are shaped around the job and agreed case by case. Whatever the shape, you own what we build.
Ring-fenced sprints
A fixed block of days on one bottleneck, with the before and after measured in your numbers.
Ongoing advisory
A standing counsel to leadership as decisions arrive: what to enable, what to buy, what to build, and when.
Fractional roles
One of us inside your team each week, embedding working practices until they hold on their own.
Practice areas
Four practices, and most engagements draw on several. Each one exists because a client needed it.
AI governance & enablement
What your firm can switch on, and under which guardrails. We turn a vague security stalemate into written policy that opens up useful capability, informed by our own time inside the FCA Digital Sandbox, the Central Bank of Ireland Innovation Sandbox, and running compliance-certified businesses.
Process acceleration & measurement
We sit with the person who owns the bottleneck, map their workflows, and rebuild it so the mechanical work moves into tooling while judgement stays with your team. We baseline before we change anything, and everything that enters production passes simple checks: required sections present, figures carried correctly, nothing invented. Better is proven in your numbers.
Shared organisational context
AI does its best work when it shares the same working memory as your team. We make your knowledge legible to models: reliable document conversion, structured folders and naming, and clear conventions so the same question gets the same consistency every time. On top of that foundation, recurring work becomes codified into playbooks your team curates and extends. We offer training to empower function or process owners before we leave, and the capability stays yours.
Agentic AI & digital identity
Agentic AI is software that can take actions on your behalf, and it needs identity controls to match. We have shipped identity flows for AI agents in production: step-up authentication and age-checks through digital identity wallets, verifiable credentials, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. As agents begin to act on your firm's behalf, this is the groundwork that keeps them accountable.
Custom MCP development
Purpose-built MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for task management, compliance reporting and market intelligence.
A company brain for daily operations
A small company's operating knowledge reorganised so the AI could work inside it.
AI-augmented candidate screening
An AI first pass on the talent inbox, with every decision staying with the team.
Forecasting that speaks plain language
Plain-language strategy updates written straight into the financial forecast.
From ad-hoc prompting to agentic engineering
Coaching and agentic workflows that roughly doubled engineering output, with evaluation built in.
Go-to-market for a new AI model
Commercial strategy, community development and fundraising support for a company building a new model.
Team
Operators first, consultants second.
Be Specific is led by Tim Boeckmann, who has founded multiple software companies serving regulated businesses, previously he created AWS's emerging-technology startup practice across EMEA, and ran the infrastructure of a London asset management firm.
Around him is a small bench of consultants, matched to each piece of work. Between the team, we have written and maintained an ISO 27001 information security programme, taken products through the FCA Digital Sandbox and the Central Bank of Ireland Innovation Sandbox, evaluated and advised on AI adoption across hundreds of companies at AWS, and shipped modern agentic identity flows in production.
We run our own operations the way we advise clients to run theirs. Applying AI across engineering, compliance, content and commercial work (cutting monthly operating costs by 58% over 13 months at one company). We bring the same methods to every engagement.
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