Practice · AI
We build AI.
We red-team it. Same firm.
Most AI consultancies do one or the other. We do both — under one partnership, with the same senior team. 2-12 weeks first value vs. Big-4’s 6-18 months. No audit conflict, no cross-sell pressure. The OpenAI Frontier Alliance partners (McKinsey / BCG / Accenture / Capgemini) and the Anthropic Claude Partner Network anchors (Accenture / Deloitte / Cognizant / Infosys) can’t red-team what they build — audit independence rules forbid it. We can.
Built for: Series B/C AI-native companies · Mid-market firms shipping AI features · Regulated industries facing ISO 42001 + NIST AI RMF + EU AI Act crosswalks
Two service lines, one team
Most partners need both.
A few only need one. We scope accordingly.
Service Line A
AI Product Development
Building real AI products that ship to production. Pair with your team or run it for you. Eight components from discovery to operations.
- ·AI Product Discovery. Use-case workshops, feasibility studies, AI portfolio plan, build-vs-buy decisions per feature.
- ·AI Product Strategy. Product briefs, regulatory scoping, pricing + packaging, competitive intel, vendor selection.
- ·Prototype to Production. RAG (real RAG), agents (sandboxed), structured extraction, content moderation, code-gen guardrails. Production-quality stack.
- ·Engineering Team Augmentation. Senior AI engineers in your codebase. Pair with your team. Knowledge transfer is the deliverable.
- ·Fine-Tuning + Custom Models. When warranted. SFT, DPO/RLHF, model security throughout. Open-weight or hosted.
- ·AI UX Patterns. Streaming, interruption, hallucination disclosure, citation rendering, agent UX, cost transparency for paid AI features.
- ·AI-Native Internal Tools. Custom internal AI: sales enablement, customer-support copilot, code-gen, knowledge management.
- ·AI Product Operations. Observability, A/B testing, AI incident response, model lifecycle migration.
Service Line B
AI Security, Governance, and Risk
Make sure the AI products you ship don’t become the cautionary tale. Thirteen components from threat modeling to incident response.
- ·AI Strategy + Roadmap. Board-readable AI strategy mapped to OKRs and risk tolerance. Build-vs-buy-vs-wait for each use case.
- ·AI Threat Modeling. Per-feature threat models pre-deployment. OWASP LLM Top-10, MITRE ATLAS aligned. Written, version-controlled.
- ·AI Red Team. Prompt injection (direct + indirect), jailbreak, data exfil, training-data extraction, supply-chain, multi-agent attacks. Findings include fixes.
- ·AI Governance Program. Policy framework (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, EU AI Act). AI committee, escalation paths, role assignments. Board-approved.
- ·AI Inventory + Risk Register. Every model, dataset, vendor, use case logged with risk classification. Living register tied to use-case intake process.
- ·Runtime AI Security Monitoring. Lakera, Lasso, Protect AI, NeMo Guardrails. Prompt firewall, anomaly detection, DLP for AI inputs/outputs. Routes to MSSP SIEM.
- ·LLM Operations. Production deployment, model selection, evals, observability (LangSmith, Phoenix, Arize), cost optimization, latency tuning.
- ·AI Code Review. Security-aware review of Copilot/Cursor/Claude Code/Replit Agent output. Supply chain checks (hallucinated packages), secret detection, license compliance.
- ·AI Training Program. Exec briefings, engineering team workshops, customer-facing team training, annual AI-specific tabletop.
- ·Vendor AI Risk Management. Pre-procurement review of every AI vendor. DPA terms, retention, training-on-customer-data, sub-processors. Annual re-review.
- ·AI Incident Response. Runbooks for prompt-injection harm, model misbehavior, training-data leak, deepfake, model exfiltration. Ties into MSSP IR retainer.
- ·AI Compliance Crosswalks. NIST AI RMF (AI 100-1), ISO 42001, EU AI Act, NIST AI 600-1 GenAI profile, sector-specific (HIPAA + AI, GDPR + AI, SOC 2 + AI, PCI + AI).
- ·AI Tabletop + Simulation. Annual scenario-driven exec exercise: deepfake CEO, customer-harm AI, training-data theft, code-gen supply-chain compromise.
Frameworks aligned
Operationalized, not framework-fetishized.
We know the standards. We know when they’re useful versus when they’re cargo-cult. The work comes first; the certification is an artifact of doing the work.
Specifics
Read the detail.
AI Product Development
We build AI products with your team. Strategy → prototype → production. Senior engineers in your codebase.
Read moreNewISO 42001 Certification
AI Management System implementation, audit prep, surveillance audits. 6-12 month path.
Read moreNewAI Governance
Policy framework, intake process, AI committee. NIST AI RMF + ISO 42001 + EU AI Act.
Read moreNewNIST AI RMF
Govern, Map, Measure, Manage. Operationalized. Crosswalks to ISO 42001 and EU AI Act.
Read moreNewAI Red Team
Prompt injection, jailbreak, data exfil. OWASP LLM Top-10 + MITRE ATLAS coverage.
Read moreNewAI Security Services
Threat modeling, runtime guardrails, monitoring, IR. Embedded in product, not bolted on.
Read moreNewAI Risk Assessment
Pre-deploy or audit-driven. Threat model + risk register + remediation roadmap. 4-week fixed-fee.
Read morePricing
Stand-alone scoped or bundled.
Inside the partnership: AI is bundled into the $500K-$1M-$3M/year envelope as a full program.
Service Line A — AI Product Development
- $75K · 4-week AI Discovery Sprint
- $100K-$200K · 4-8 week Prototype
- $250K-$1.5M · 12-26 week Production Build
- $40K-$120K/mo · Engineering Retainer
- $50K-$300K · Fine-Tuning Project
Service Line B — AI Security, Governance, and Risk
- $250K · 90-day AI Modernization Sprint (most partners start here)
- $50K-$200K · AI Red Team (4-12 weeks)
- $50K-$100K · AI Risk Assessment (4 weeks)
- $25K/mo · AI Implementation Advisory
- $75K-$150K · AI Governance Build-out (8-16 weeks)
Continuous AI security monitoring bundled into MSSP at +$5K-$15K/month.
Who you’ll work with
Quinnlan Varcoe
CEO and Founder · OSCP · GIAC × 10 · 17 credentials across the practice
GIAC Cloud Security Automation, GIAC Python Coder. Currently shipping AI products + running AI red teams. The same hands that build review the security.
Every partnership begins with me. Not a sales rep, not an account executive, not a junior. The first call, the diagnostic, the strategy work — that’s mine.
Building or securing AI?
Schedule a callTrusted by partners across the practice
Reviews
From the senior people
who’ve worked alongside Quinn.
The named companies beside each reviewer are their employers — not Varcoe partnerships. Each quote is a professional reference from someone who’s shipped work alongside Quinn directly.
“The partnership model isn't marketing language with Quinn — it's how she actually works. Senior judgment, single accountable contact, and the rigor to integrate across IT, security, and AI under one roof.”
Aaron Birnbaum
Managing Partner
“Quinnlan brings more than expertise — she brings strategic alignment. The ability to scale operations without sacrificing depth is exactly what serious organizations need from a modernization partner.”
Caroline Lombard
Threat Specialist
“I've worked with Quinnlan on incidents most teams couldn't navigate — Log4j among them. The technical depth and the calm under fire are real, and they're rare.”
Justin Cox
Senior AWS Security Analyst
“One of the most seamless collaborations I've had in this industry. Composure under pressure, technical precision, and the kind of credibility that compounds — exactly the senior bench a modernization partnership needs.”
Soufiane Jihadi
Senior Incident Response Consultant
Original references collected on the legacy Varcoe site · LinkedIn endorsements available on request