Helping engineering teams use AI well.
Burghley AI Services was founded by a group of senior software engineers who noticed that the rise of AI was fracturing tech teams into four distinct groups:
- The Experts: Safely and effectively leveraging modern AI capabilities.
- The Reckless: Blindly pasting proprietary code, personal data, and API keys into prompts.
- The Holdouts: Refusing to touch AI out of fear for their jobs, and quickly falling behind.
- The Inefficient: Using AI safely but poorly, burning time and tokens without proper context management or subagents.
This led to the creation of the Burghley AI Services to ensure nobody gets left behind in the fast changing landscape of AI usage in software houses.
Fixing the issues we have found across our teams is what taught us how to fix it on others. We look at the real pull requests, the real codebase, and the real day-to-day usage patterns across your team, then turn what we find into a practical policy your engineers will actually follow. It isn't AI governance in the legal sense, and it isn't an audit of the models themselves - it's an audit of how your people actually use them.
Where This Audit Came From
It started with one team. Some engineers were careful with what they shared with AI tools. Some threw everything at them, indiscriminately. Some refused to use them at all. And some used them safely but inefficiently, wasting spend and time they didn't need to. Fixing that split and turning it into shared, sensible practice. This is the same work we now do for other software houses.
THE FOUR PATTERNS WE SAW
Responsible users, reckless overusers, AI-avoidant holdouts, and well-intentioned but inefficient users. Every engineering team we've since audited has some mix of all four - we find out which, and where.
Core Principles
Specificity
We don't deal in generalities. Every finding is tied to a real pull request, a real file, or a real pattern we saw in your codebase - not generic advice about "using AI responsibly."
Practicality
The output is a code of conduct your engineers will actually follow, not compliance theater. If a rule doesn't survive contact with a real sprint, we don't write it.
Staying Current
AI tools and team habits both keep moving. We offer ongoing retainer support to revisit the audit as your stack, your tools, and your team's usage evolve.