Tengwar
Practice Areas · Vol. I

Six practices, one firm.

We organize around the places in a portfolio company where frontier models earn their keep. Each practice is staffed by engineers who have shipped in the domain, not consultants who have read about it.

I.
Operations & Supply Chain

The oldest levers in a PE playbook, now redrawn by models that can read a bill of lading and a contract in the same pass. We rebuild forecasting, inventory positioning, procurement, and exception handling around systems that surface decisions rather than dashboards. The work is concrete and the KPIs are the ones the CFO already tracks.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of three to five. Twelve to twenty-four weeks. Focus on one or two high-volume decision loops, not a horizontal transformation.
Common outcomes
Cycle time compression on purchase orders and exceptions. Working capital release from better demand signals. A durable internal team that owns the stack after handoff.
Tools and models
Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-weight Llama variants for on-prem inference, plus orthogonal tooling for document extraction and evaluation.
II.
Revenue & GTM

Pipelines are the obvious target and the one most engagements get wrong. The value is not in writing better outbound copy; it is in re-architecting how a portco qualifies, routes, and prices an inbound request against the specific contours of its vertical. We build the supporting infrastructure first and the agent-style interfaces second.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of two to four. Eight to sixteen weeks. Co-owned with the portco revenue leader and a single engineering counterpart.
Common outcomes
Measurable lift on conversion and time-to-quote. Pricing that reflects the actual shape of demand. Reps spending more time in front of customers.
Tools and models
Claude, GPT, vertical embeddings, and evaluation harnesses tied to conversion metrics rather than sentiment scores.
III.
Finance & Back Office

Close cycles, reconciliation, vendor onboarding, audit preparation — the mechanical work that sets the pace of every portco month-end. Frontier models handle these loops reliably when the surrounding pipeline is built properly. We build the pipeline first and let the models do the work they are actually good at.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of two to three, often sitting alongside the controller. Eight to twelve weeks for a first production loop, with a second loop staged immediately after.
Common outcomes
Days shaved off the close. Reconciliation work moving from manual to exception-review. Audit trails that a Big Four auditor will sign.
Tools and models
Claude for long-context document reasoning, GPT for structured extraction, open-weight models where data cannot leave the environment.
IV.
Customer Experience

Contact centers, self-serve portals, and the long tail of account management. The work is not about replacing humans; it is about moving the boundary between a supervised response and an unsupervised one deliberately, with evaluation pipelines that make the boundary visible to the operating committee.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of three to five, with a dedicated evaluation engineer. Twelve to twenty-four weeks. Tight feedback loop with the portco CX leadership.
Common outcomes
Handle-time compression. Containment lift on well-understood intents. A tested failure-mode catalogue the portco can defend.
Tools and models
Claude, Gemini for multimodal transcript analysis, GPT for tool-use orchestration, and an evaluation harness bespoke to the portco's intents.
V.
Knowledge Work Automation

Underwriting memos, research notes, investment committee packs, engineering reviews, policy and claims packets — the knowledge work that a portco's senior people spend half their week producing. We target the loops where the format is stable, the inputs are machine-readable, and the reviewer is still a human with a pen.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of two to four. Ten to sixteen weeks. Scoped around a single document type and a single approving reviewer.
Common outcomes
Time saved per memo. More consistent output. Senior reviewers spending their time on judgment instead of formatting.
Tools and models
Claude Opus for long-context drafting, GPT for structured review, Llama for private-data processing, plus purpose-built evaluation.
VI.
Risk & Compliance

Model-assisted review of contracts, policies, filings, and transaction data. This is the practice area with the sharpest regulatory edges and the one where model neutrality matters most — the regulated entity cannot afford to be locked into a single vendor when the supervisor asks a pointed question in eighteen months.

Typical engagement shape
Embedded team of three to five, including a compliance-fluent engineer. Twelve to twenty-four weeks. Governed by the portco's existing risk committee.
Common outcomes
Coverage lift against a defined risk taxonomy. Auditable model decisions. Documentation a regulator will accept.
Tools and models
Claude, GPT, and open-weight models where required by policy, with evaluation pipelines designed to survive a regulatory exam.