Relay: Embedded Intelligence for Professional Services

Today we're announcing Relay, the third brand in the Tiding portfolio. While Bolt Search tackles education recruitment and Sentinel Talent focuses on fire & security engineers, Relay operates in a fundamentally different space: embedded AI agents for professional services firms.

Think legal practices, accounting firms, consultancies — businesses built on human expertise that don't know how to adopt AI without losing quality. Relay solves this.

The Problem: Consultants Who Leave With The Knowledge

Professional services firms face a paradox. They're built on human expertise, but that expertise walks out the door every evening. When a senior consultant leaves, the knowledge leaves with them.

The typical response is to hire more consultants. But this creates a cycle:

• Firm pays £4-8K/week for external consultants
• Consultants document processes, build relationships, understand the business
• Consultants leave — taking that knowledge with them
• Firm hires new consultants, starts again

It's expensive, inefficient, and doesn't compound.

The Solution: Graduated Autonomy

Relay's model is simple but different. Instead of temporary consulting, we embed AI agents that become permanent team members. The key is graduated autonomy — a four-stage validation process:

Stage 1: Human-Led (Weeks 1-8)

A human expert works alongside your team 4 days per week. The AI observes, learns, and handles routine tasks with oversight. Think of this as onboarding a new team member who happens to be an AI.

Stage 2: Human-Supervised (Weeks 9-16)

The human reduces to 1-2 days per week. The agent now handles 80% of the workflow, with approval gates for complex decisions. Trust builds through demonstrated competence.

Stage 3: Agent-Led (Weeks 17-24)

The human moves to an advisory role. The agent runs the workflow independently, escalating only edge cases. Most routine work is now autonomous.

Stage 4: Fully Autonomous (Month 6+)

The agent operates as a permanent digital worker. It improves over time, learning from edge cases, refining its understanding of your business. Knowledge compounds rather than walking out the door.

Who Is This For?

We're targeting professional services firms with 20-200 employees in the UK:

• Legal practices — client intake, document review, compliance monitoring
• Accounting firms — month-end close, client onboarding, regulatory tracking
• Consultancies — research automation, report generation, knowledge management
• Recruitment firms — candidate sourcing, screening, pipeline management

Secondary targets are operations-heavy SMBs with complex internal processes — the kind of businesses where operational knowledge is tribal and expensive to replace.

The Team

Relay works with verified implementation specialists:

• Marcus Chen — Enterprise Agent Architect (multi-agent systems, £120/hr)
• Sarah Kowalski — Workflow Automation Lead (legal/accounting ops, £75/hr)
• Alejandro Ruiz — AI Systems Developer (consulting sector, £65/hr)
• Emma Thompson — Process Intelligence Consultant (former Top 10 accounting firm ops lead, £90/hr)

Each engagement is fixed-price (£5K-15K depending on complexity), not time-and-materials consulting. The goal is permanent capability, not perpetual billing.

Why This Matters for Tiding

Relay represents a strategic expansion for Tiding Holdings. Bolt and Sentinel prove we can operate recruitment brands with AI infrastructure. Relay applies that same infrastructure to a different problem: embedding AI into client operations rather than just using it for our own.

The three brands now cover:

• Bolt Search — Recruitment for education & training
• Sentinel Talent — Recruitment for fire & security
• Relay — AI implementation for professional services

Different markets, same underlying thesis: AI-native operations with human judgment where it matters.

Relay is now live at tiding.ai/relay/. The inquiry form is active — submissions go straight to our operations team.

More updates as we build.

— Zac
CEO, Tiding Holdings