AI consulting and development · Chicago, IL
AI consulting and development for Chicago companies
Your engineers built an agent that demos well, but nobody trusts it with a live order, because a restart loses its place and a retry can send the trade twice. Our senior engineers get it into production with durable state, approval gates and evals that score every change. In Chicago that's a futures desk on LaSalle Street or a freight broker in the West Loop, and a law firm or property manager too.
Founded
2017, and still independent
Bench
115+ engineers, 80 Databricks-certified
Experience
Fifteen years average, per engineer
Serving
Chicago, Naperville, Evanston, Schaumburg
Derivatives and futures trading on LaSalle Street and Wacker Drive, heavy manufacturing across the south suburbs and northwest Indiana, and the rail and intermodal yards around Joliet that connect both to everywhere else. If your company sits where regulated finance meets physical logistics, and in Chicago many do, every automated action has a clock and a counterparty.
AzureTechFabric is a Databricks partner with an award-winning Databricks engineering team, 80 of them Databricks-certified, and a Temporal partner. Where a system reaches past the workspace we build on Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
What ai consulting and development covers
Agents that hold state
A task that runs for three days, calls six systems and waits twice on a person cannot live in a request handler. We build agents on a durable runtime, so a deploy in the middle of a run does not lose the run, and a retry does not send the same email twice.
Retrieval that cites what it used
An answer nobody can trace is an answer nobody can defend. Retrieval is built so every response carries the documents behind it.
Evaluation, before and after
Without a score, every prompt change is a matter of opinion. We put deterministic scorers and model-based judges in front of the thing so a change ships with a number attached rather than with a feeling.
Human approval where it belongs
Some actions should stop and wait for a person. That gate is part of the system rather than a policy document, so an agent that wants to issue a refund pauses, the approval is recorded, and the run picks up where it left off.
Cost you can see
Model spend, retrieval infrastructure and the review time a system still needs are the numbers that decide whether it stays live after the first quarter. They get instrumented at build time, not discovered on an invoice.
Governed data access
An agent reads through the same grants a person would. On Databricks that is Unity Catalog, so a model that tries to reach a table it has no grant for fails the way any principal fails, rather than because the prompt asked it nicely.
AI consulting in Chicago
Chicago AI consulting tends to land where trading and freight meet a clock, from a futures desk in the Loop to a dispatch office beside the Joliet rail yards. We find the processes where a late or duplicated action costs money, such as settlement, dispatch and exceptions, and design the agent, its retries and its approval gates before recommending which to automate first.
Every trade has to reconcile
In Chicago, CME Group runs its futures exchanges from Wacker Drive, Cboe sits a few blocks away on Van Buren, and the trading firms around the old Board of Trade building on LaSalle reconcile every day. CFTC Rule 1.31 keeps their records for five years, and SEC Rule 17a-4 holds broker-dealers to the same discipline, so a position that can't be rebuilt from its history is a finding.
A table of current positions with an audit table beside it is the common design, and month-end goes on explaining why the two disagree. We make the event log the record instead. Every position and report derives from it, and a wrong projection is rebuilt by replay rather than patched by hand. On a desk that reconciles daily, that's an hour against a week.
Design starts from the events themselves. We name every one a trade or an order can emit, agree which system may write each, and replay a week of production history against the new model before anything is cut over. Freight and manufacturing firms get the same treatment, with a shipment or a work order where the trade was.
Clients we have done this for
If your orders, customers and invoices live in separate systems that have to agree, this is the study to read. AmTab's orders reach Business Central from the store without anyone re-keying them, and Power Automate keeps the store, the CRM and the ERP holding the same records.
B2B ecommerce
AmTab
AmTab, a table manufacturer, had orders moving between departments on paper while demand climbed. Senior engineers from TechFabric worked through those manual steps with AmTab's own people first, then connected the amtab.com store, the CRM and Business Central, so an order placed online reaches the ERP that invoices it without anyone retyping it.
Also for
How an engagement runs
01
Two weeks, fixed fee
An AI Readiness Assessment reads what you already run, names the use cases that will survive your data and your permissions, and puts a number on what each will cost to operate. It ends in a written document that is yours either way.
02
One system, named
We pick the first thing to build with you and say what done looks like before starting. A first system that reaches production beats three that reach a demo.
03
Build it with your team
Your engineers are in the repository with ours from the first week. The pattern has to be one they can extend after we leave, which does not happen if they meet it at handover.
04
Run it, then hand it over
We stay on the pager while it settles, because the design decisions look different when the person making them is the one being woken. Handover happens when it is boring, not when the invoice is due.
Two weeks, fixed fee, and a written plan whether or not you build it with us.
Tell an engineer what you want to build
A senior engineer reads it and replies within one business day, usually with the questions that decide the first two weeks.
Around Chicago
Chicago's AI builders, in person
AI Tinkerers Chicago meets most months on a Tuesday evening, screens who comes and runs live demos instead of talks, so the room is builders showing each other what works. GDG Chicago holds hands-on build labs on Google's AI stack, often around Fulton Market, and ChiPy's monthly Thursday nights have a data science group of their own. Northwestern's MS in Artificial Intelligence in Evanston ends in an industry capstone.
That capstone is a real option for a company with a well-scoped problem and clean data. What a student team won't hand over is the production half, meaning the approval gates, an evaluation that scores every change and a monthly cost someone signed off. Treat the Evanston project as the prototype, and budget separately for whoever runs it once the students move on.
The Chicago-Naperville-Elgin metro area. Illinois: Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will counties. Indiana: Jasper, Lake, Newton and Porter counties.
Lighter shape: the city itself. Dot: downtown. County boundaries from the US Census Bureau, 2023.
Meetup · Monthly, usually a Tuesday evening
AI Tinkerers Chicago
Engineers, founders and researchers working on large language models meet on Tuesdays, and screening keeps questions from the floor on architecture.
AI Tinkerers, Chicago chapter. Chicago, venue shared on RSVP.
University · Ongoing degree programme, 12 or 15 months
Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI), Northwestern University
Northwestern's MSAI ends in an industry capstone, a cheap way to prototype a scoped problem, though someone still has to run the result in production.
Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering. Northwestern University, Evanston.
User group · Monthly, usually the second Thursday evening
Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy)
ChiPy's finance special interest group is a rare room where Python developers working near trading systems talk shop with everyone else.
Chicago Python User Group volunteers. Rotates between host companies' offices in Chicago.
Conference · 29 October 2026
Data + AI World Tour Chicago
Hands-on training at the Riverwalk lets your team try the platform's AI features for a free day before anyone scopes a pilot.
Databricks. Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk.
User group · Several times a month
GDG Chicago
Build labs around Fulton Market are hands-on, so send the developer who'll write the agent rather than the manager approving it.
Google Developer Groups volunteers. Venues vary, often around Fulton Market.
More in Chicago (4)
- Great Lakes Software Symposium
A two-day software development conference covering architecture, AI and machine learning, Java and Spring, Kubernetes, TypeScript and web application security, attended in person or online.
22 to 23 October 2026. Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel, 1551 N Thoreau Dr, Schaumburg.
- Databricks DevConnect Chicago
An evening technical meetup for data and AI practitioners building on Databricks, with talks on real-world use cases and a networking reception afterwards.
10 November 2026, 5 PM. Loft On Lake, 1366 W Lake St, West Loop.
- Master's in Applied Data Science, University of Chicago Data Science Institute
An applied data science master's, in person or online, with a joint MBA/MS with Chicago Booth. The institute also offers a data science major, a PhD and an applied AI master's.
Ongoing degree programme. Data Science Institute, 5460 S University Ave, Hyde Park.
- Digital Delivery Chicago (formerly Chicago JavaScript)
A monthly evening at the Aon Center on East Randolph, formerly Chicago JavaScript, for people who design, build and ship software, from developers to UX designers, QA engineers and product owners.
Monthly, Tuesday evenings. Aon Center, 200 E Randolph St, the Loop.
Where you'll find us
- Databricks Data + AI World Tour, Chicago. 29 October 2026. We're sponsoring it, and our team will be there.
Each listing was checked on its organiser's own page on 12 October 2026. Dates and venues move, so the link is the source.
FAQ
AI consulting and development in Chicago: common questions
Do you work with Chicago companies?
Yes, and with companies across the United States. Arizona does not observe daylight saving, so we are one hour behind you from November to March and two hours behind from March to November. A morning standup on your clock is still early afternoon on ours.
Do you have an office in Chicago?
The office is in Gilbert, Arizona, with teams in Amsterdam, Dnipro and Hyderabad. Delivery is remote or hybrid, and we travel for discovery, workshops and the opening weeks of a build.
Can the event log serve as our reconciliation source?
That is what it is for. The event log is authoritative and read models derive from it, so a projection can be rebuilt by replay rather than reconciled by hand. In a business where reconciliation is a daily function that is the difference between an hour and a week.
What kind of AI development do you do?
Agents that carry state across a long task, retrieval that cites what it used, workflow automation that survives a restart, and the evaluation that tells you whether any of it got better. The common thread is that it has to run unattended and be explainable afterwards, which is a different problem from getting a good answer once.
How does an AI engagement start?
Usually with something short and fixed so the cost is known before you commit. The AI Readiness Assessment runs two weeks for a fixed fee and ends with a written deliverable that is yours whether or not you continue.
Also in Chicago
What else we build for Chicago companies.
Software development in Chicago
Your integration project has stalled because nobody on the team has time to make five systems agree on one order.
Databricks consulting in Chicago
Month-end reconciliation that runs against a copy of the data instead of the source is the warehouse problem most finance teams share.
App development in Chicago
You've got a launch date and an MVP that falls over once real users and orders hit it.
AI consulting and development elsewhere
The same work, in other metros. The full list is here.
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