HelmUnit is your fractional AI & automation department. A senior engineer documents your processes, automates them, and keeps improving them — so quotes go out faster, orders stop waiting in someone's inbox, and the work no longer lives in one person's head. Every month you get a report on what actually changed. Scale from ⅛ of an engineer to a full one, month by month. Cancel anytime. You own everything.
A full-time automation engineer costs €130K+ in year one once you add employer contributions and a recruiter fee — and takes 4–9 months to find. Most SMBs need a quarter of that capacity.
A freelancer works until they disappear — and everything they knew goes with them. No documentation, no backup, no continuity.
Consultants hand you a strategy deck. Someone still has to build it — then maintain and improve it.
One employee knows how orders really flow. If they leave or get sick, the process stops with them.
Everyone says AI. Nobody can tell you what it means for your invoices, orders, and paperwork.
Your tools cover 80% of the job. The remaining 20% is someone re-typing data between systems, every day.
document → automate → improve → monitor
Your engineer works with your team, maps how work really flows, and writes it down properly. Most companies have never had this — it pays off even before any automation.
We build it: integrations, AI document & email processing, workflow automation. AI where it earns its place, plain automation where it's simpler. Then we test it against real cases from your business — with the right answer labelled by hand — before it touches live work.
We measure what actually changed — turnaround times, throughput, error rates, how much still needs a human. Refine what works, kill what doesn't.
Everything stays watched, maintained, and reported. We keep scoring it against real cases, so you can see how often it is right and how often it hands something back to a person. Nothing rots silently.
How capacity typically moves through that loop
From the team's delivery track record at azurevibes.dev.
Quote turnaround — the sales pipeline stopped waiting on the estimating team. AI processing of project documents + SharePoint integration.
Of back-office re-typing removed by capturing field data once, at source — and client reporting stopped running a week behind.
Orders quoted and invoiced without anyone retyping them — and they move the day they arrive.
Introductory rates for our first cohort — whatever rate you start on is the rate you keep.
Analysis at the start, steady improvement at the end. For smaller firms, often enough for the whole journey.
Steady building. The typical pace for a small firm's backlog — or continuous improvement at a mid-sized one.
A full engineer. For mid-sized firms clearing a real backlog — scale down when it's done, or add a second engineer if the backlog justifies it.
Finished building for now? Everything we built stays monitored, patched, and improved in small steps — without paying for capacity you no longer need.
Commit to twelve months and take 10% off any tier. Month-to-month stays month-to-month — cancel anytime, as always.
Listed rates are for remote delivery. We do come on-site — and prefer to, especially while we are mapping how your work really happens — but that is a fraction of an engagement, not the shape of it. On-site days are quoted separately, by destination and duration.
Code, data, documentation — yours from day one.
No exit fee, documented handover included.
No account managers. You work directly with the person building your systems.
Monthly report: what we built, what it unlocked, and what it took off your critical path.
You keep everything running: automations, source code, credentials, and documentation any competent developer can pick up. Handover is included.
Into environments you control. We host in the EU by default, and in your own country — the UK, Norway, Switzerland or anywhere else in Europe — when you need it there. GDPR by design. AI models see only task-relevant data; your documents never train anyone's models.
Automation and AI are not the same thing. Moving data between your systems needs no AI at all — a plain integration is cheaper and more reliable. Reading an incoming PDF or email needs an AI model. Handling a whole multi-step process with judgment calls may justify an AI agent. We pick the simplest tool that does the job, because you're not paying for AI — you're paying for work that moves faster and stops depending on one person, and we report that either way.
We measure it, and you see the numbers. Before anything touches live work we take twenty or more real cases from your business — actual orders, actual documents — and label the correct answer for each by hand, with someone on your side checking that those labels are right. Then we run the system against them and report how often it is correct, how it fails when it fails, and how often it correctly hands a case back to a person instead of guessing. That scoring keeps running after go-live, because the awkward cases are where the value is: anyone can demo the easy path. If a supplier changes their invoice layout, we want to find out from the numbers rather than from you.
Continuity. You get a primary and a secondary contact, and everything is documented to handover standard — nothing depends on one person's memory or calendar.
Recruiting takes 4–9 months, and a senior automation engineer costs €130K+ in year one once you add employer contributions and a recruiter fee — for capacity you may only need a quarter of. Here you start next week and scale in fractions.
Most of the work is remote, and the listed prices are for remote delivery. We do come on-site, and we prefer to — particularly early on, when we are mapping how your processes really run, because watching the work happen in person surfaces things no interview will. But that is a fraction of an engagement rather than the shape of it: building, testing and monitoring are all done just as well remotely. On-site days are quoted separately, since travel and accommodation vary by destination and by how long we stay.
We keep your documentation and transparency obligations in order as part of the service (transparency rules apply from August 2026).
No pitch deck, no obligation. Tell us your most repetitive process — we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth automating and which fraction to start with.
Thanks — we'll be in touch within one business day.