You run the business all day, then run the paperwork all night. Don't go shopping for software — just tell us where you're short-handed, and we'll work out who it takes. You approve the work. We do the rest.
Quotes, invoices, messages, job notes, chasing people who don't reply — none of it is the work you actually get paid for, and all of it lands on you. Software was supposed to fix this; instead you've got subscriptions that each do a tenth of the job. Hiring would fix it, but a part-time admin, a bookkeeper and a marketer don't fit most small-business margins. That's the gap we work in.
Everyone else hands you a catalogue of characters and calls it simple. They've taken the coding out, not the choosing. You still have to work out which of twelve solves your problem, sign up, configure it and hope.
"I'm quoting at ten at night." That's the whole brief. Working out whether that's one teammate or three is our job, not yours.
Relay is your account manager and Austen watches the desk. You never manage a fleet of anything — you talk to one person about one problem.
Available at 3am on a bank holiday, and again on Boxing Day. Not a claim about technology — just the plainest advantage of this kind of help over the other kind.
Done job by job, not business by business. Most owners need one or two teammates, not twelve.
A person already does the job well and has the hours to do it. Adding technology to a job that works is a cost, not a gain.
We'll tell you when that's the answer. A desk that fills every request it's given is a desk you stop trusting.
Someone owns the job and is good at it, but the day runs out. A teammate works alongside them and does the groundwork.
Their time goes back on judgement instead of admin. They keep the decisions.
It gets done badly at 11pm, or not at all, and a hire can't be justified. The teammate covers it under supervision.
Not replacing someone you were going to hire — doing work that was never getting done.
You'll never be handed a roster and asked to choose. You get a person and an account manager, the way you would at any decent agency.
Thirty years across printing, banking, legal, policing and property. Every teammate is checked by him before it goes anywhere near your business, and he stays on it while you're getting comfortable.
One point of contact for everything you've got with us. Works out what your request actually needs, routes it, and keeps it moving. However many teammates you end up with, you deal with Relay.
And the three most people meet first:
Hiring, onboarding, rotas — and an honest answer on whether you actually need a hire.
The diary, the job packs, the site reports. Keeps the week in an order that makes sense.
Invoices raised off finished work, chased politely, and a straight answer on who owes you what.
Rex Home Services is a genuine property and garden maintenance business in Essex, and it is a client of ours. ForemanAI and IvyAI sit inside its operations — quoting real jobs, booking real work, writing real site reports and turning job photos into before-and-afters for real commercial clients, every week. We're early, and we won't pretend otherwise: no invented case studies, no manufactured statistics, no testimonials we haven't earned. What we can show you is the work itself.
placeholder · a real site report, a real before/after and a real quote drop in here, redacted — do not invent numbersTwo minutes at the desk and you'll know what it would take. If the answer is "you don't need us yet", we'll say that too.
Nine functions, and under each one the things people actually say when we ask what's short. If a whole department is your job, start there. If all nine are your job because it's just you, start at the bottom — that one's yours.
You don't want a plumber. You want a bathroom — and a bathroom needs a tiler and someone to make good afterwards. Most of what people ask us for takes two or three teammates working together, which is exactly why picking one off a shelf never works.
Before anything is built, every job in your business gets read one of three ways — across People, Process, Data and Technology, job by job. That's the Chowa Method: balance, not bots. The point isn't twelve teammates on day one, it's the one or two that pay for themselves first.
It stays exactly as it is. Adding technology to a job that already works is a cost, not a gain — and it's usually where the trouble starts.
The teammate is loaded with their knowledge and your specifics, and carries the groundwork. The person stays the judgement.
Nobody's doing the job, or you're doing it badly at 11pm. The teammate carries more of it themselves — built more carefully, with tighter rails and closer supervision.
Three different things get called "training an AI". It pays to keep them straight.
Rebuilding the AI itself — infrastructure-scale work done by the model makers. Not what your business needs.
Telling a teammate its role, priorities and constraints. Fast and cheap — but on its own, generic.
A structured, indexed knowledge base built from your own paperwork — your prices, your processes, your past jobs, the way you phrase things — so your teammate answers from what your business actually knows, and says "let me check" rather than guessing.
A gap stated beats a blank filled.
There is no dashboard to learn and nothing to migrate. Your teammate has an address, and it's on WhatsApp. You talk to it the way you'd talk to a new starter — and it earns more rope as you get comfortable.
It knows your business and it replies. Nothing goes out without you. This is where most people stop being sceptical.
Watching the inbox, writing the replies, raising the invoices — all of it waiting on your yes. Just say yes to the drafts. We'll do the rest.
The routine things go out on their own, with a record of every one. Anything that sends money or makes a promise still comes back to you. The keys stay with you throughout.
A staffing desk doesn't parade its three thousand temps at you and ask which you fancy. It gives you an account manager who works out what you need. Same here — except our bench never phones in sick.
Thirty years across printing, banking, legal, policing and property — and now running two small businesses of his own. Nothing goes near your business until he's checked it, and he stays on the account while you're getting comfortable. When you want a person, you get this one.
Your single point of contact for everything you have with us. Takes the request, works out what it actually needs, brings the right teammates on, and keeps it moving. One number, however many seats you end up with.
Fourteen seats, and the one at the head is yours. Nobody starts with all of them — most businesses run one or two for months. Mind you, the sub you bring on for a fortnight has a habit of keeping the shirt.
Bench seats are named for the job, not the trade — Gear runs operations whether you lay driveways or run a claims desk. Vertical specialists carry the trade in the name — ForemanAI — because they're built for one industry and know its vocabulary out of the box. A second one, front of house, is in service on Rex and not yet named publicly. Most businesses end up with a seat or two and, if we've built one for your trade, a specialist alongside them.
The desk will work out who it takes — and tell you honestly if it's nobody.
Each one earns the next. You never buy the whole ladder on day one, and whatever you've paid for stays yours if you walk.
You tell us what you're short of. We tell you what it would take — and sometimes that it's already covered and you should leave it alone. A desk that fills every request it's given is a desk you stop trusting.
One job, done once, so you can see it rather than take our word for it. A week of quotes drafted. A backlog of site reports written up. No account, no setup, no commitment — you get the work back and you decide.
The teammate is configured, loaded with how your business does it, and working in your own tools. It reaches you by email and WhatsApp — no dashboard to learn, nothing to migrate. Austen watches it for the first stretch.
Part of the business now — kept sharp, governed, given more rope as it earns it. Another seat gets brought on when a real need shows, not because it was in a bundle. Leave, and your data, knowledge base and records stay with you.
Because they'd be made up. What it costs depends on what the read finds, and we'd rather say that plainly than print a price that isn't true. We'll talk actual numbers on the call — after the desk has done its bit, or straight away if you'd rather.
Datavation's consulting practice runs its own augmented team on client work. On the top tier, Embedded, a production build of your own team is part of the engagement — you watch the seats work on your business for months, then you own them. It's the only door between the two companies, and it only opens in that direction: nobody buys a team here on the strength of a slide.
See the practice at datavation.co.uk →Built for trades and field-service businesses. Quotes drafted, jobs booked, site reports written, client emails ready to send — all of it waiting on your one-click yes. The specialist that stops the paperwork eating your evenings, configured to how you actually work.
Every part of it is a step you approve, never a black box.
Prices a job from an enquiry — type, size, extras — with a firm quote after a visit.
Turns job photos into a before-and-after that helps sell the next job.
Takes the booking, confirms it, and keeps the diary straight.
Raises invoices from completed work and chases politely.
Writes up each job from photos and notes — client-ready.
Anything that sends or spends waits for your yes. Record of every one.
Not a concept — ForemanAI runs the operations of a genuine property and garden maintenance business in Essex, quoting real jobs and writing real site reports every week. A front-of-house specialist answers the enquiries alongside it. See them working, then picture them on yours.
Two minutes at the desk — your trade, your problem, and what it would take.
Short version: this website collects nothing. No cookies, no tracking, no analytics. If you email us, we keep that email so we can answer it. That is the whole of it.
Datavation Limited, trading as datavation.ai. We are the data controller for anything you send us.
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Nothing. There are no cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels and no advertising tags on this site. We do not know you visited.
The desk — the panel that asks where you are short — runs entirely inside your own browser. Your answers are never sent to us. Nothing is stored, on your device or ours, and closing the tab loses it.
Two things do involve someone else. The site is hosted on Vercel, whose servers keep standard access logs including your IP address, as any web host does. Typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your IP address reaches Google when the page loads. We do not receive either of those, and we do not combine them with anything.
When you email us, we hold what you chose to send — usually your name, your email address, your business and what is bugging you. If we go on to work together, we will hold what the work needs: contact details, what was agreed, and the records the job produces.
We do not send marketing email to people who have not asked for it, and we do not sell, rent or share your details with anyone for their own purposes.
Our own suppliers, and only so far as they need to: the email and file services we run the business on, our hosting, and our accountant. They act on our instructions and cannot use your details for anything else.
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We build AI teammates for a living, so it is worth being exact. Enquiries you send us are read by people. If we work together, the agents we build for you run on your data to do your work — and that data stays yours. We do not use your business information to train anybody’s AI model, and we do not pool it with another client’s. Leave, and you keep the lot: your data, your knowledge base, your records.
Enquiries that go nowhere are deleted once it is clear nothing is happening. Client records are kept for as long as we work together and then for the period the accounting and tax rules require.
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In the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, other than where a supplier stores data elsewhere under the safeguards UK data protection law requires.
You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to us holding it on the basis of legitimate interests, or ask for it in a portable form. Ask, and we will do it within one month.
Tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or on 0303 123 1113.