Managed services vs staff augmentation: who carries the estimation risk
Managed services transfer delivery risk at a 20-40% price premium. Staff augmentation keeps control and speed. Which fits AI and data work, and when each fails.
Blog
Short pieces on day rates, salary benchmarks and sourcing models, written for the person who has to sign the contract. We publish twice a week and include the parts that don't favour us.
The five kinds of AI agent companies, what each actually sells, where each one breaks, and why most agent projects stall on data engineering rather than agents.
Managed services transfer delivery risk at a 20-40% price premium. Staff augmentation keeps control and speed. Which fits AI and data work, and when each fails.
The four sourcing models for AI engineering compared on cost, speed, accountability and exit risk, including the cases where staff augmentation is the wrong answer.
Day rate bands for senior AI, ML and data engineers across the UK, Germany, Poland and Romania, what drives the spread, and how to read a quote you have been given.
Why dividing an engineer's salary by working days understates the true cost by 30 to 50 percent, and the full calculation to run before comparing hiring against contracting.
The questions that separate vendors who ship production AI systems from vendors who demo them, plus the answers that should end a conversation early.
Nothing in that category yet.
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