Building in public · AI infrastructure · Advisory firms
Ridley
Research

A lean consulting firm building AI operating systems for professional services — and documenting every step.

Most people selling AI services can't show you their own system. We can. Ridley Research is a lean consulting firm running on the same AI infrastructure we deploy for clients — persistent memory, autonomous agents, automated workflows, scheduled operations. Built, broken, fixed, and rebuilt in real production.

We started by solving our own problems. Email triage, client follow-up, data entry, research summaries, scheduled reporting — the manual computer work that fills advisor hours and produces nothing for clients. Once the system worked for us, we started deploying it for others.

Building in public means this site is a live artifact. The blog documents what we build, what breaks, and what we learn from it. The demos are real deployments, not slide decks. If something fails in production, you'll read about it here. That accountability isn't incidental — it's the whole point.

Pilot · Early March 2026
First External Deployment:
A 9-Person RIA in Plano, TX

No technical staff. Compliance-sensitive environment. The deployment covers email automation, client follow-up queues, scheduled portfolio reporting, and document handling — all running on hardware the firm controls. Zero client data leaves without explicit approval.

This is the thesis made concrete: a professional services firm with no IT department, running production AI infrastructure. We're documenting the full engagement. If it works — and it will — we'll have the repeatable playbook for the next 50 firms like it.

In progress — results forthcoming
Two Weeks, No Sleep, and What I Actually Built New Feb 25 What We Learned Rebuilding an Agent Stack from Scratch Feb 23 3 AI Employees Running 24/7 on One Machine Feb 24 The Clean-Room Pattern: Using Cloud AI Without Leaking Client Data Feb 24 The Business Case for AI Agents Feb 24 Memory Architecture for Agents Feb 23 All posts →
Want to skip
the learning curve?

We build the system for you — process audit, full agent OS deployment, team onboarding, SOPs, and support. From $497 for a personal install to $2,000–$5,000 for a full business loadout.

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