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AI Engineering · Hull · Canarlo, Leeds
A Yorkshire AI development company for Hull's freight, energy and manufacturing firms. We work with Humber businesses remotely, and make the trip when a room beats a call.
Working in Hull
Hull sits at the mouth of the Humber, the UK's busiest trading estuary, and the working day here is shaped by what comes up and down it. Roll-on trailers, bulk cargo and containers all leave a trail of paper: bills of lading, delivery notes, packing lists, customs declarations, certificates. Most of it arrives as PDFs and email attachments, and somebody still types it into a system. That typing is where a good share of a forwarder's overhead lives, and it's the first thing we'd look at.
The second thing Hull has is wind. The blade factory on Alexandra Dock turned the city into a centre for offshore wind manufacturing, and the Humber Freeport, designated in 2021, is meant to draw more of the energy-transition supply chain in behind it. Those supply chains run on certification, inspection and maintenance records. Along the estuary there are also chemicals and process plants, with their safety data sheets, permits and shift logs. This is document-heavy, audit-heavy work, which is where an AI that reads carefully and cites its sources earns its place.
Hull is also a university city with an independent streak: it has had its own telephone company for over a century, and KCOM is still based here. The digital scene is small and close, so word travels. For most firms the realistic AI project isn't a flagship. It's the haulier that stops re-keying orders, the engineering supplier who can find the right inspection record in seconds, the charity or housing team buried in casework. We would rather ship one of those properly than pitch a grand plan.
Where AI pays off
Pull consignee, weights, references and commodity codes out of bills of lading and delivery notes, flag the odd ones for a person, and send the rest into your freight system.
Offshore and heavy-engineering supply chains run on inspection reports and material certificates. Make them searchable with a citation back to the page, so an auditor's question takes seconds.
Answer questions about safety data sheets, permits and shift logs in plain English, with the source paragraph shown, for people on the plant who don't have time to read forty pages.
Draft replies to haulage, storage and fabrication enquiries from your rates and live availability, with a person approving anything that commits you.
Working with Hull
Hull is about an hour from Leeds by road or rail. We work with Hull businesses remotely from Yorkshire as standard. Port and plant work often needs seeing the floor, so we'll make the trip for kickoff, an architecture review or a walk round the site rather than guess from a call.
Delivery itself runs remote-first — weekly demos on a real preview URL, readable diffs, UK office hours. The engineer who writes the proposal writes the code and takes the call when something breaks.
What we build
The full detail — what we build, how it works, pricing — lives on the service pages. They cover the whole of the UK; AI Development & Automation is the place to start.
AI Development & Automation
Agents, document AI, RAG and workflows — shipped with audit trails. Every automated decision logged with input, output, and model version.
Custom Software
Next.js + Supabase, per-row security at the database, UK-hosted. Eight security patterns enforced by default.
Ongoing Support
Security patches, dependency updates and monitoring from the engineer who built it. Month-to-month, from £500/month.
A Blueprint from £4,500, builds from £18,000, AI development from £1,200/month. Fixed scope, GBP invoicing, no day-rate dance.
How much does AI engineering cost? →Frequently asked
Within limits, yes. Typed documents and clean scans — bills of lading, delivery notes, certificates of origin — can be pulled into your system with a confidence score on every field. Anything under the threshold goes to a person with the original beside it. The error rate varies by supplier and scan quality, so we measure it on your documents before you commit, and we don't quote a number we haven't tested.
Usually. Plenty of port and plant systems can't be reached from outside, so we build around file exports, scheduled drops and a small agent running inside your network, rather than asking for a hole in the firewall. We agree the approach with your IT lead before any work starts.
The pattern is familiar: certification-heavy, document-heavy, with auditors who want to see how a record was produced. We would start with one document flow, write the brief, and agree how to measure it. If the fit is wrong, we'll say so on the first call.
A Blueprint from £4,500, builds from £18,000 and AI development from £1,200/month, with scope written down before billing starts. Invoiced in GBP, VAT itemised. The SOW names the technological uncertainties so your accountant can file the R&D tax credit claim without rewriting anything.
You. The repo, the schemas, the eval set, the runbook. No Canarlo SaaS in the loop, no licence fees — plain TypeScript any competent engineer can pick up. Vendor swap is a config change, not a re-architecture.
More from Canarlo
Start here
Twenty minutes, UK office hours. If the work fits, we’ll say so. If you’re better served by an audit first — or by not hiring us at all — we’ll say that too.