AI and innovation consulting
Be specific about what you are trying to change.
Be Specific is a consultancy run by people who have built and run their own companies in regulated industries. We help firms put the right AI to work, and we help founders and organisations get a venture or an innovation programme moving.
We work with investment firms, professional services businesses, regulated industries and companies building AI products, as well as founders and the organisations that support them.
How we engage
Engagements are shaped around the job and agreed case by case. Whatever the shape, you own what we build.
Ring-fenced sprints
A fixed block of days on one bottleneck, with the before and after measured in your numbers.
Ongoing advisory
A standing counsel to leadership as decisions arrive, on what to take on and what to leave.
Fractional roles
One of us inside your team each week, embedding working practices until they hold on their own.
Practice areas
Four practices, and most engagements draw on several. Each one exists because a client needed it.
AI governance & enablement
What your firm can switch on, and under which guardrails. We turn a vague security stalemate into written policy that opens up useful capability, informed by our own time inside the FCA Digital Sandbox, the Central Bank of Ireland Innovation Sandbox, and running compliance-certified businesses.
Process acceleration & measurement
We sit with the person who owns the bottleneck, map their workflows, and rebuild it so the mechanical work moves into tooling while judgement stays with your team. We baseline before we change anything, and everything that enters production passes simple checks, with required sections present, figures carried correctly, and nothing invented. The improvement is measured in your numbers.
Shared organisational context
Models are more useful when they can read the same material your team already works from. We make that knowledge legible, with reliable document conversion, structured folders and naming, and clear conventions, so the same question gets a consistent answer every time. On that foundation, recurring work is written into playbooks your team curates and extends. We train the people who own each function or process before we leave, and the capability stays yours.
Agentic AI & digital identity
Agentic AI is software that can take actions on your behalf, and it needs identity controls to match. We have shipped identity flows for AI agents in production, including step-up authentication and age checks through digital identity wallets, verifiable credentials, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. As agents begin to act on your firm's behalf, those controls are what make each action traceable to a person.
Startups and innovation
Startups and innovation programmes
We work with founders directly and we help organisations design and run the programmes that support them. The experience comes from both sides. We have founded and scaled our own companies, and we have built and run innovation and accelerator programmes at organisations like AWS and Techstars. That combination means we understand what founders actually need, and how to deliver it through a programme that works repeatedly. A good number of the ventures we work with are building with AI or adopting it early.
Founder mentoring and advisory
We work directly with founders on the decisions that match their stage, including fundraising, first hires, pricing and a change of direction. We have raised venture capital, managed investor reporting, and mentored founders through Techstars and AWS's startup programme across EMEA.
Innovation programme delivery
We help universities, accelerators and corporate teams design and run programmes that support founders. Tim built the emerging-technology startup practice at AWS across EMEA, advising thousands of early-stage companies and running specialist workshops and cohort programmes.
Commercialisation and go-to-market
We help ventures and research teams move from a working product to paying customers, covering pricing, partnerships, regulatory strategy, early sales and the design of pilots. The work draws on products we have sold into enterprise and government markets, and on advising other ventures making the same move.
Operations, governance and growth
We help founders put operating foundations in place, including financial forecasting, board governance, information security certification and compliance programmes. We have built and maintained each of these inside companies we founded and ran.
Custom MCP development
Purpose-built MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for task management, compliance reporting and market intelligence.
A company brain for daily operations
A small company's operating knowledge reorganised so the AI could work inside it.
AI-augmented candidate screening
An AI first pass on the talent inbox, with every decision staying with the team.
Forecasting that speaks plain language
Plain-language strategy updates written straight into the financial forecast.
From ad-hoc prompting to agentic engineering
Coaching and agentic workflows that roughly doubled engineering output, with evaluation built in.
Go-to-market for a new AI model
Commercial strategy, community development and fundraising support for a company building a new model.
Governance and compliance
Information security, quality management and digital identity compliance, built into companies selling to enterprise and government customers.
Building an innovation support programme
Programme design, specialist workshops and cohort delivery for an emerging-technology startup practice across EMEA.
Team
Operators first, consultants second.
Be Specific is led by Tim Boeckmann, who has founded multiple software companies serving regulated businesses. He previously created AWS's emerging-technology startup practice across EMEA, and ran the infrastructure of a London asset management firm.
Around him is a small bench of consultants, matched to each piece of work. Each engagement has a named lead and, where the work calls for it, a second pair of hands from the team. You know who is working with you before anything starts.
Between the team, we have written and maintained an ISO 27001 information security programme, taken products through the FCA Digital Sandbox and the Central Bank of Ireland Innovation Sandbox, evaluated and advised on AI adoption across hundreds of companies at AWS, and shipped modern agentic identity flows in production.
The team has founded and scaled multiple companies, mentored and advised hundreds of ventures through accelerator and innovation programmes, taken regulated products through certification, and raised capital from institutional investors.
We run our own operations the way we advise clients to run theirs. At one company we applied AI across engineering, compliance, content and commercial work and cut monthly operating costs by 58% over 13 months. We only take on work where the team has recent, direct experience of the problem.
Stay in touch
Occasional updates on AI adoption and what we are learning.
Short, practical emails when we have something worth sharing. No spam. Unsubscribe any time.
Contact
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