Third Order
Labs

Applied AI consulting for complex, high-stakes environments.

Most organizations know AI matters but not where to start or what's actually worth building. We bring the clarity and the engineering to figure that out — then build it with you.

Scroll
I

First Order

Bolt on a chatbot, call it AI, check the box.

Surface-level adoption with no strategy behind it. Where most companies are right now.

II

Second Order

Product thinking applied to AI.

Asking the right questions about where AI adds value — but still scoped to a single team or surface.

III

Third Order

The full picture.

Product, engineering, culture, costs, failure modes, guardrails — org-wide AI transformation with intentionality.

This is where we operate.

What We Do

We bring strategic clarity and hands-on engineering to every engagement.

We assess where you are and map where you need to go. A real technical and organizational audit that tells you what's worth building, what's not, and what has to be true underneath.

We build the thing. Prototypes, internal tools, data infrastructure, production systems. We write code, ship software, and stay accountable to outcomes.

Custom agent architectures, skills and plugin development, multi-agent coordination, and workflow automation. We build the systems that make AI actually do work — not just answer questions.

Ongoing strategic guidance for engineering and product leaders navigating AI decisions. Architecture reviews, vendor evaluation, build-vs-buy, team structure. A senior technical partner on call.

Half-day and full-day sessions for engineering teams, leadership, and cross-functional staff. Practical, hands-on, and tailored to your industry. Also running free community AI workshops for local businesses through chambers of commerce and libraries.

Built, not theoretical

Production systems and active projects. Every one ships with guardrails, real-world grounding, and intentional constraints.

Logistics / Life Sciences Deployed

Compliant Enterprise AI Platform

Internal AI platform for a regulated logistics company operating under strict data retention requirements. Built within their existing cloud tenancy with no external data exposure — shipped under an aggressive compliance deadline.

  • Zero-day data retention compliance throughout the stack
  • Internal knowledge retrieval across document management systems
  • C-suite AI training and enablement
Industrial IoT / Cold Chain In Progress

Data Lakehouse Modernization

Assessing and modernizing big data infrastructure for an industrial IoT company. Designing a modern lakehouse architecture as the foundation for downstream analytics and AI capabilities.

  • Legacy system assessment and migration planning
  • Modern lakehouse architecture design
  • Expanding into QA automation and AI applications
Pharma / Cold Chain In Progress

Regulated QA Copilot

A human-in-the-loop AI assistant for quality analysts in regulated pharma environments. Built for auditability and trust — not just answers.

  • RAG architecture with embeddings + vector DB
  • Evidence grounding and traceability for every response
  • Bounded generation designed for regulatory scrutiny
Consumer / Civic Live

Thinking of U / Write Yo Rep

An AI-to-physical-mail platform. Generates human-sounding messages and original artwork, then produces real mailed postcards. Extended into a civic product for letters to Congress — same architecture, different constraints.

  • End-to-end pipeline: LLM + image generation + physical fulfillment
  • Prompt architecture for tone fidelity and emotional realism
  • Platform extensibility across different use cases and safety profiles
Consumer / Education Live

Ready Set Roam

An agentic activity discovery engine. Learns from your history, proactively searches for activities by timeframe, and filters by real-world constraints like weather — so suggestions are actually doable.

  • Agentic search across internet, places APIs, and weather data
  • Personalization through learned preference history
  • Structured, printable output optimized for real-world use
We bring strategic clarity and hands-on engineering to every engagement — because AI transformation requires both.

We bring outside perspective and top-down clarity to teams deep in the weeds — then roll up our sleeves and build alongside them. The work spans from architecture and system design to production code and deployment. One team, full stack, no handoff gap.

Third Order Labs is led by Ian Jones — 15 years building and leading engineering teams in regulated, high-stakes environments. MEng in Computer Science from Cornell. Practitioner-first: close enough to the code to debug production issues, experienced enough to set technical direction.

Let's talk.