How we got here
Pinnacle AI Source started in late 2021, when our founder, Rhian Gallagher, left a machine-learning role at a large retail analytics firm. She had spent five years building models that generated impressive accuracy scores in Jupyter notebooks but rarely made it into production. The gap between "proof of concept" and "running system" frustrated her.
She set up the company with one goal: close that gap. The first project was a demand-forecast model for a mid-sized e-commerce retailer in Harrogate. It went from initial data audit to live predictions in nine weeks. The retailer reduced overstock by 18 % in the following quarter.
Word spread. By mid-2022 we had four clients and two more engineers. Today the team is eleven people, all based in West Yorkshire. We have delivered over sixty projects, and we still measure ourselves by the same question Rhian asked on day one: is this model actually running in production and making someone's job easier?
We have not taken outside investment. Growth has been funded by client revenue, which keeps our incentives simple: we do well when our clients do well. There is no pressure to upsell services you do not need or to extend timelines beyond what the project requires.
What we believe
Four principles that shape every project we take on.
Production or nothing
A model that lives in a notebook is a research exercise, not a business tool. We only consider a project successful when the system is running in your environment and your team is using it daily. Every statement of work includes a production-deployment milestone with a specific date.
Honest assessment
If your data is not ready, we say so. If a simpler rule-based system would solve the problem, we recommend that instead. We have turned down projects where AI was not the right fit, because taking on work we cannot deliver well damages both our reputation and your budget.
Data belongs to the client
We do not retain copies of your training data after a project ends. Models run on infrastructure you control. IP-assignment clauses in every contract make ownership explicit from the start.
Teach, do not create dependency
We want your team to understand the systems we build. That means plain-language documentation, hands-on training workshops and architecture decisions that favour standard tools over proprietary frameworks. If you eventually want to bring maintenance in-house, we will help you do it.
The team
Eleven people, all based in West Yorkshire. Here are the four leads you will work with most often.
Rhian Gallagher
Founder and lead data scientist
Rhian spent five years in retail analytics before founding the company. She leads model design and client strategy, and still writes production code most weeks.
Tom Ashworth
Head of engineering
Tom oversees deployment pipelines and infrastructure. Before joining in 2022, he was a senior DevOps engineer at a fintech company in Manchester, where he built ML-serving platforms handling 40,000 predictions per hour.
Sana Mirza
NLP engineer
Sana designs and fine-tunes the language models behind our chatbot and document-processing systems. She holds a PhD in computational linguistics from the University of Sheffield and joined the team in early 2023.
James Okoye
Senior data engineer
James runs data audits and builds the ETL pipelines that feed clean data into our models. He has a particular talent for finding quality issues that would otherwise surface as mysterious accuracy drops three months after deployment.
Credibility and track record
Numbers and facts, not adjectives.
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62 projects delivered since 2021
Across retail, logistics, property, legal and professional services. Every one reached production deployment.
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93 % client retention rate
Measured as the percentage of clients who engaged us for a second project or signed a support agreement after their first deployment.
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ICO registered, Cyber Essentials certified
We are registered with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (registration ZB578341) and hold current Cyber Essentials certification for our internal systems.
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11 full-time staff, zero contractors
Everyone who works on your project is a permanent employee based in West Yorkshire. We do not subcontract development work.
Get in touch
Whether you have a specific project in mind or just want to explore whether AI could help your business, we are happy to talk. No sales pitch, just a straightforward conversation.
Visit or write
9 Cremin Glade, Leeds LS1 4AP, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Phone: +44 113 300 7115
Email: [email protected]
Office hours
Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30 GMT/BST. We aim to reply to emails within one working day. If you call outside office hours, leave a voicemail and we will return your call the next morning.