QAI Labs
An applied AI engineering practice that puts production AI on infrastructure the client controls, together with the agentic frameworks that make those systems auditable.
qailabs.io ↗Conversation history held by a third-party platform
None
The assistant runs on hardware we control. State lives on our own disk and in our own vector store.
Restarts survived with state intact
800+
Boot counter in the assistant's own state file, incremented on every start since 2026.
Public site content that is anonymised
None
Every claim on qailabs.io names the thing it refers to, or it was removed.
Each figure above is read from a system we operate, and the note says which one. Where a figure would flatter us but cannot be evidenced, it is not here.
Why it exists
Sabia’s consulting work kept arriving at the same wall. A client would be interested in applying AI to something, and then somebody in risk or legal would ask where the data goes. The honest answer for most tooling is: to somebody else’s API, under somebody else’s terms, with the logs and traces on somebody else’s disk. For a bank, a government department or anyone holding health data, that ends the conversation.
QAI Labs exists to answer that question differently. It is a trading brand of Sabia Solutions, not a separate legal entity, and it does two things: it builds AI systems that run inside the client’s own boundary, and it builds the orchestration and evaluation layer that makes those systems inspectable afterwards.
What we actually built
The practice runs on its own product. Before selling an operating assistant to anyone else, we built one for ourselves and gave it real work: infrastructure administration, company filings, monitoring, and the running of this group’s other businesses.
That assistant is a Python service under systemd with persistent memory, a local vector store, an encrypted secrets vault, scoped access for two named users, and the ability to execute against real systems rather than only describe them. It has been running long enough to accumulate an operating history, which is the only thing that makes the capability claim checkable.
The public site is a static Next.js build served from a Node process behind nginx on infrastructure we own. It carries no analytics, no cookies, no CDN scripts and no third-party fonts, which is a small demonstration of the same argument the practice makes commercially.
How we measured it
The three figures above are read from systems we run, not estimated. The boot counter is a field in the assistant’s state file. The absence of third-party conversation history is a property of the architecture rather than a policy: there is no external service holding it. The content claim is the result of an audit in August 2026 in which every unverifiable statement on qailabs.io was either evidenced or deleted.
We do not publish revenue, headcount, client names or utilisation for this business, because those are not figures a reader can independently check. Everything on this page is something you can verify.
What we would do differently
We built the marketing site from a generic agency brief, which seeded it with fictional team members, four anonymised case studies and a set of invented performance figures. All of it had to be stripped out later, and the anonymity turned out to be doing the work of hiding that the engagements were not real. Starting from what the business could actually evidence would have produced a smaller site, sooner, with nothing to retract.
We also over-invested in breadth before the practice had trading history. Six service pages and a full platform section is a lot of surface to keep honest when the case study count is one. If we were starting again we would publish the one real write-up and let the service pages follow the work.
Start with what is in the way.
Most of this work is shaped by the obstacle rather than the ambition. A deal that keeps stalling at the same stage, a process nobody owns, a product that will not sell, a decision that has been open for months. Tell us yours and we will say honestly whether we are the right people for it.