H&Y Labs · Los Angeles, California
Your model works. Your demo landed. Then it met legal, security, and procurement — and stopped. H&Y Labs is a founder-led AI engineering firm that designs enterprise AI systems to clear those gates on the first pass, not the third.
Fig. 1 — Enterprise AI adoption path
A-100
01
Use case
Cleared
02
Pilot build
Cleared
03
Security & privacy review
Blocked
04
Data agreements
Waiting
05
Production
Waiting
06
Scale & measure
Waiting
Most enterprise AI programs stop at gate 03. Not because the model is wrong — because nobody designed the controls, the data boundary, or the evidence trail before the build started. We start there.
Enterprises are not short on AI ideas. They are short on AI systems that a CISO will sign, a regulator will accept, and a finance team can forecast. That is an engineering and governance problem, and it is solvable — but not by another proof of concept.
Every engagement produces working artifacts — architecture, code, control matrices, roadmaps — that stay with your team whether or not we continue.
ENG-01
A structured review of where AI actually pays in your business, what your existing controls will block, and what to fix first. We interview the people who will have to approve the system, not just the people who want it.
ENG-02
The shared substrate your AI applications run on: model routing across providers, retrieval and memory, evaluation harnesses, caching, observability, and cost controls. Built vendor-neutral so you can swap models without rewriting products.
ENG-03
Controls mapped onto the frameworks you already run — SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF, FedRAMP — so AI review becomes a checklist instead of a negotiation. Designed by a CISSP-certified engineer who has shipped in regulated environments.
ENG-04
We embed with your team and ship the first workloads to production — not a demo environment. Includes runbooks, on-call handoff, and the training your engineers need to own it after we leave.
Most AI programs design the system and then ask whether it is allowed. We reverse that. The approval path is designed alongside the architecture, so the security review is a formality rather than a wall.
We identify every function that can say no — security, privacy, legal, procurement, clinical or risk — and get their requirements in writing on day one.
Week 1
Classify what data the system touches, decide what may leave your perimeter, and design retrieval and inference around that line rather than against it.
Weeks 1–2
One workload with a measurable baseline, a named owner, and a business metric. Not five experiments competing for the same attention.
Week 2
Routing, evaluation, caching, and telemetry go in from the start, so the second workload costs a fraction of the first and the model layer stays replaceable.
Weeks 3+
Runbooks, evidence, dashboards, and enablement. Success is your team operating the system without us and reporting the number to the board.
Final phase
H&Y Labs is deliberately small. You are not buying a brand and receiving a first-year analyst. Engagements are run by an engineering leader with 25 years of experience building cloud, AI, and security systems at organizations where failure carried regulatory consequences.
That background is the reason the method starts with controls: shipping speech AI into hospitals and cloud services into government teaches you exactly where AI programs die.
H&Y Labs is an AI engineering firm that helps enterprises move artificial intelligence from pilot to production. The firm designs AI architecture, governance controls, and delivery plans for organizations in regulated industries, and offers four engagements: readiness assessment, agent platform architecture, AI governance and security, and production delivery.
H&Y Labs works with mid-market and enterprise organizations where a security, privacy, or compliance function has veto power over new technology. Typical clients are in healthcare, financial services, insurance, defense and aerospace, and regulated SaaS. Typical buyers are the CTO, VP of Engineering, Chief Information Security Officer, or Chief Digital Officer.
H&Y Labs is founder-led, so the engineer who scopes the engagement is the engineer who delivers it. Large firms sell partner-level expertise and staff the work with junior consultants. H&Y Labs also writes production code rather than only slide decks, and every engagement ends with artifacts the client owns outright — architecture, working implementations, and control matrices.
A readiness assessment from H&Y Labs takes three to five weeks. Agent platform architecture takes six to ten weeks. A governance and security engagement takes four to eight weeks. Full production delivery runs three to six months depending on the number of workloads and the client's approval cycle.
H&Y Labs is deliberately vendor-neutral and works across Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Meta Llama, and open-weight models running on private infrastructure. Systems are built with a routing layer so models can be substituted without rewriting applications, which protects clients from pricing changes, deprecations, and vendor lock-in. Deployments run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or on-premises GPU infrastructure.
H&Y Labs designs the data boundary before any model is selected. Regulated data is classified first, and the architecture is then built so that protected health information, cardholder data, or controlled unclassified information stays inside an approved boundary — using private inference, redaction, tokenization, or on-premises deployment where required. Engagements are structured to produce the evidence that HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and FedRAMP reviewers ask for.
H&Y Labs prices engagements as fixed fees against a defined scope rather than open-ended hourly billing, so the budget is known before work starts. Assessments and governance engagements are scoped as fixed-fee projects. Longer delivery work is priced as a monthly retainer. Pricing is provided after a scoping call, once the workload, data sensitivity, and approval path are understood.
H&Y Labs is based in Los Angeles, California, and works with clients across the United States. Engagements run remotely by default, with on-site sessions for discovery workshops, architecture reviews, and executive readouts when a client prefers them.
Every H&Y Labs engagement starts with a scoping call of roughly 45 minutes covering the intended workload, the data involved, and who has to approve it. That call produces a written scope and fixed price at no cost. Clients who want to test the working relationship first can begin with a two-week diagnostic and keep the resulting artifacts regardless of whether the engagement continues.
Bring one workload that should be in production and is not. Forty-five minutes, no deck. You leave with a written scope, a fixed price, and an honest answer about whether this is worth doing at all.