Ciara Maguire
Founder and lead ML engineer. Formerly at Kainos and a Belfast logistics startup. Specialises in time-series forecasting and anomaly detection.
How we started
In 2019 our founder, Ciara Maguire, was working as a data engineer at a logistics company in Belfast. She kept seeing the same pattern: leadership wanted "AI" but had no internal capacity to clean data, choose the right algorithm, or maintain a model after launch. Consultancies quoted six-figure sums and twelve-month timelines for problems that could be solved in weeks with the right approach.
She left to start Efficient AI Co. with one principle: deliver a working model before the client loses patience. That meant smaller teams, shorter feedback loops, and honest conversations about what machine learning can and cannot do. Four years later the company has grown to nine people, but the principle hasn't changed.
We remain deliberately small. Every project is led by a senior engineer, not delegated to juniors after the sales call. Clients talk directly to the person writing the code.
Our values
These are not aspirational slogans. They are rules we use to make decisions every week.
-
Show the numbers, not a narrative
We publish precision, recall and F1 scores for every model we ship. If accuracy is 78%, we say 78%, not "highly accurate". Clients deserve data they can verify independently.
-
Own the maintenance burden
A model that drifts after three months is worse than no model at all, because people trust it. We include six months of monitoring in every contract and set up automated retraining triggers so performance stays within agreed thresholds.
-
Say no when the data isn't there
If a client's dataset is too small, too biased or too noisy to produce reliable predictions, we say so upfront. We have turned down roughly one in five initial enquiries for this reason. It saves everyone time and money.
-
Keep the bill predictable
We quote fixed prices for defined scopes. If scope changes, we agree a new price before work begins. No surprise invoices at the end of a sprint.
The team
Nine people, four specialisms. Everyone works from our Sporer-on-Witting office at least three days a week; the rest is remote.
Rory Donnelly
Data engineering lead. Builds the ETL pipelines and cloud infrastructure that feed our models. Eight years of experience with AWS and Azure data services.
Amara Osei
NLP specialist. Handles document classification, entity extraction and chatbot fine-tuning projects. PhD in computational linguistics from Queen's University Belfast.
Declan Harkin
Project manager. Keeps timelines honest and translates between technical and business stakeholders. Certified Scrum Master with a background in fintech delivery.
Where to find us
Our office is in Sporer-on-Witting, Northern Ireland. We work with clients across the UK and occasionally in the Republic of Ireland. Most initial meetings happen over video call, but we are happy to visit your site for workshops and data-audit sessions.
Address: United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Sporer-on-Witting, NS1 8WW, 2 Cummerata Lane
Phone: +44 7772 427025
Email: [email protected]