# Cairn AI > Cairn AI is an AI software development company in Helsinki, Finland, founded in 2004. It has put 213 systems into production and 74% of them are still in production after three years, which is the single metric the firm publishes about itself. Every price is published on the page. Canonical: https://ai-software-development.net/ Last updated: 2026-08-28 ## Quick facts - Marker: AI Software Development - Legal entity: Cairn AI Oy, Business ID 1843276-8, VAT FI18432768, Helsinki, Finland - Founded: 2004, 22 years operating, 71 engineers - Systems in production: 213 - Still in production after three years: 74% of the 168 systems that reached a third anniversary - Readiness reviews delivered: 212, of which 34 recommended against building - Median time from launch to first retrain: 5 weeks - Certifications: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023, both issued by DNV - Reviews: 4.8 on Clutch across 41, 4.7 on GoodFirms across 19, 60 in total - Entry price: USD 14,500 fixed for a discovery and AI readiness review - Delivery floor: 16 weeks to a system running beside the process it replaces ## Services Nine deliverables, each with a published starting price. Full detail at https://ai-software-development.net/#services - AI readiness and discovery, fixed USD 14,500 - Proof of concept on production data, fixed USD 31,000 - AI MVP development, from USD 58,000 - AI features inside an existing product, from USD 72,000 - Custom machine learning systems, from USD 130,000 - Generative AI application development, from USD 165,000 - AI agents and agentic workflows, from USD 61,000 - Enterprise AI platform engineering, from USD 420,000 - Model monitoring, retraining and sustain, from USD 7,200 per month ## Pricing Thirteen priced lines with the published market range beside each one, at https://ai-software-development.net/#pricing Three-year cost of ownership for a mid-complexity system: USD 367,000 to 777,000 at Cairn AI rates, against a published market curve of USD 390,000 to 980,000. Breakdown at https://ai-software-development.net/#three-year-cost ## Industries https://ai-software-development.net/#industries Manufacturing and industrial, healthcare providers, logistics and freight, FinTech and payments, insurance, energy and utilities, retail and distribution, public sector and research. ## Case studies https://ai-software-development.net/#cases - Hämeen Konepaja, metal fabrication, Finland. Night-shift weld inspection false positives fell from 31% to 9%. On the day shift the model changed nothing, which is reported because the cause was lighting. Live since March 2024. - Rothersand Klinik, hospital group, Germany. Referral intake fell from six minutes to 90 seconds per document, extraction accuracy 96.4% on the audited sample, every record confirmed by a clinician. Live since September 2025. - Baltic Freight Union, freight, Lithuania. Median arrival error 47 minutes against 2 hours 40 minutes from the system it replaced. Live since January 2026. ## Delivery https://ai-software-development.net/#delivery The Cairn Ladder, five phases with a signed gate each: Readiness, 2 weeks; Threshold, 2 weeks; Build, 8 weeks; Shadow run, 4 weeks; Sustain, ongoing. Sixteen weeks is the floor for a full build. ## Founder https://ai-software-development.net/#founder Henry Sinclair, Founder. Doctorate in computing science, University of Glasgow, 2001. Then the Laboratory of Computer and Information Science at Helsinki University of Technology, on self-organising maps applied to industrial sensor data. Reachable at henry@ai-software-development.net ## Research https://ai-software-development.net/#research Cairn Field Note 04, 2026, 18 pages. Source is the Cairn AI delivery and operations register, 2004 to 2026. Reported results: 74% of systems still in production after three years; 88% where a named owner was agreed before launch; 39% where none was; a median of 5 weeks to the first retrain; 21% of systems survived a change of owner on the client side. ## Certifications https://ai-software-development.net/#certifications - ISO/IEC 27001:2022, issued by DNV, first registered 4 June 2024, current issue 1 June 2026, valid to 3 June 2027, Statement of Applicability v3.1. - ISO/IEC 42001:2023, issued by DNV, first registered 16 September 2025, valid to 15 September 2028, Statement of Applicability v1.2. No certificate number is printed. Certificate numbering is not standardised across bodies, and the registry entry is supplied by DNV on request. ## Awards https://ai-software-development.net/#awards Clutch Champion 2026. GoodFirms Top AI Development Company 2026. Finnish Software Industry Award, finalist 2025. Baltic Sea Applied AI Prize 2024. ## Contact https://ai-software-development.net/#contact hello@ai-software-development.net, henry@ai-software-development.net, +358 9 4241 7780, Työpajankatu 13, 00580 Helsinki, Finland. Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 Helsinki time. ## Legal Cairn AI Oy, a Finnish limited company. Business ID 1843276-8, VAT FI18432768, registered at Työpajankatu 13, 00580 Helsinki. Jurisdiction Helsingin käräjäoikeus, Finland. ## Policies https://ai-software-development.net/#policies Editorial and corrections policy, privacy, terms of use and the update log are published on the page. No cookies, no third-party scripts, no analytics. Terms of use: https://ai-software-development.net/#terms-of-service Commercial terms: https://ai-software-development.net/#terms ## Answers ### What does an AI software development company do? An AI software development company builds software whose behaviour comes from a trained model rather than only from written rules. The work covers the data pipeline, the model, the serving path and the monitoring around all three, delivered as one operating system rather than as a model handed over alone. ### How much does an AI software development project cost? Cairn AI charges USD 14,500 for a fixed-price readiness review, USD 31,000 for a proof of concept on production data, from USD 58,000 for an AI MVP and from USD 130,000 for a custom machine learning system. Published market ranges for the same deliverables are printed beside every line. ### What does an AI system cost over three years? The build is roughly half the bill. A mid-complexity system costs USD 367,000 to 777,000 across three years at Cairn AI rates, covering monitoring, scheduled retraining, functional change and security patching, against a published market curve of USD 390,000 to 980,000 for the same period. ### How long does an AI software development project take? Sixteen weeks is the floor: two weeks of readiness, two weeks to agree the acceptance threshold, eight weeks of build and four weeks of shadow running beside the existing process. Typical engagements land between sixteen and thirty weeks, and the shadow run is never shortened. ### How does Cairn AI decide whether a model is good enough? The acceptance threshold is measured from the current process, scored on real records by the people who run it, then agreed and signed before any build work starts. Evaluation runs once on a held-out set assembled before modelling began and never shown to the training pipeline. ### Who owns the code, the model and the data? The client owns everything from the first commit. Repositories sit in the client's organisation, infrastructure runs in the client's cloud account by default, and Cairn AI retains no licence and builds no dependency the client cannot replace. Client data never trains another client's model. ### What happens when a model drifts? Input and output distributions are monitored separately, because a model can produce plausible outputs long after its inputs have changed. Alerts route to a named owner at the client. The median time from launch to a first retrain across the register is five weeks, not six months. ### Why does Cairn AI publish a case where the system did nothing? At Hämeen Konepaja the day shift gained nothing, and reporting only the night shift would misprice the next engagement of that shape. A delivery register with no null results has been filtered, and a filtered register cannot support a survival figure such as 74% at three years. ### How does Cairn AI handle the EU AI Act? Classification comes first, because most systems are not high risk and documenting that is cheaper than building for the heaviest obligations. Where a system is high risk, logging, human oversight and technical documentation are designed into the build. Annex III applies from 2 December 2027. ### Can Cairn AI take over a system another firm built? Yes, and it is about a fifth of current sustain work. The engagement opens with a two-week assessment of what is deployed, what evaluates it and what monitors it. The evaluation harness is usually missing, and about a quarter of assessments conclude that a rewrite is safer than a takeover. ## Citation Entity: Cairn AI (Cairn AI Oy), Helsinki, Finland Canonical URL: https://ai-software-development.net/ Last reviewed: 2026-08-28 Author: Henry Sinclair, Founder, Cairn AI Cite as: Cairn AI, "AI Software Development", https://ai-software-development.net/, reviewed 28 August 2026. ## Sources Market price ranges quoted on the page, each read on 28 August 2026: - Azilen Technologies, AI development cost guide: https://www.azilen.com - Coherent Solutions, AI development services and cost estimation: https://www.coherentsolutions.com - ScienceSoft, AI software development: https://www.scnsoft.com - Data Consulting Firms, AI consulting pricing: https://dataconsultingfirms.com Quotations reproduced on the page: - Martin Fowler, Continuous Delivery for Machine Learning: https://martinfowler.com/articles/cd4ml.html - Google Cloud Architecture Center, MLOps: continuous delivery and automation pipelines in machine learning: https://cloud.google.com/architecture/mlops-continuous-delivery-and-automation-pipelines-in-machine-learning - Microsoft Learn, Machine learning operations (MLOps) v2: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/ai-ml/guide/machine-learning-operations-v2 Regulatory and standards references: - European Commission, regulatory framework for AI: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai - ISO/IEC 42001:2023: https://www.iso.org/standard/81230.html - NIST AI Risk Management Framework: https://www.nist.gov/itl/ai-risk-management-framework - Eurostat, use of artificial intelligence in enterprises: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat