The economics of custom development just changed
AI changed the economics of custom software. In our own development work, four focused hours today can produce the kind of working prototype that could have represented roughly $15,000 of custom development just two years ago. Rather than ask you to believe that, we’ll prove it on one of your real business problems.
One process · One 30-minute interview · Up to four development hours
It’s a proof, not production software — selective, bounded, and run outside your live systems. You decide what happens next.
The speed is new. The judgment isn’t. InteractiveInfo has been writing custom software and delivering business systems since 1994 — for manufacturers, energy companies, real estate organizations, benefits administrators, and other operating businesses.
Founded 1994 · Incorporated 1999 · Custom software delivered for three decades
Launch program · Initial cohort
The purpose is our next generation of AI and agentic case studies. You bring one real operational bottleneck; we build a working proof of a better version. Selective and bounded — it isn’t free production development, and it isn’t for everyone.
No production access required for the proof
The sprint runs outside your live systems, on representative examples. If the proof earns the right to continue, we bring IT into the production conversation. Business case first. Integration project second.
The mess
Every growing company ends up here: a tool bought for one problem, a spreadsheet bridging two others, and people carrying data between them by hand. It works right up until volume, staff turnover, or a customer question exposes it.
Our job is the second picture — keep the systems that earn their place, connect them cleanly, and remove the manual work between them.
Before / the mess
Nothing here is broken on its own. The cost is in the crossings: every line is a person, a re-type, or a thing that gets missed.
Do you recognise this?
The offer
We’ll map what’s actually happening, identify where time, money, and errors are leaking, and tell you whether to buy, integrate, automate, build — or leave it alone. If it’s a strong fit for a Build Sprint, we’ll spend up to four development hours proving it instead of describing it.
No requirements document · No sales presentation · About 30 minutes
Sometimes we’ll tell you not to hire us. That’s a legitimate outcome.
Takes a few minutes. Contact details come last.
Why the judgment matters
We’ve spent decades sitting with owners, operations leaders, controllers, and the people actually doing the work — then turning what they described into production software: line-of-business applications, ERP-connected integrations, workflow and approval systems, consolidated reporting, quality and safety systems, field data capture.
AI multiplied our leverage; it didn’t create our expertise. The hard parts are still the same: knowing what to automate, what to leave human, and how to take a working prototype all the way into software a company can run on for years.
Three decades of business-software judgment · Today’s AI development speed
In practice
Selected client work
Problem-first, as always: each of these started as a process someone inside the business was holding together by hand.
Motorola
Quality control
Moved a manual quality-control process off paper records into automated data collection, with notifications, analytics, and reporting built around it.
Praxair
Engineering-to-ERP workflow
An engineering-to-ERP workflow that transfers engineering designs into the ERP and manufacturing systems instead of people re-keying them between the two.
Anadarko Petroleum
Safety management
A safety management system covering safety meetings, incident tracking, training records, and compliance reporting.
Hines
Cost and cash-flow accounting
A cost and cash-flow accounting system tracking project budgets, revenue, expenses, and profitability.
Reliable Administration Services
Benefits administration
A benefits administration system supporting insurance plans, eligibility, enrollment, and billing.
Detail
We describe this work in scope and outcome terms on a call rather than publishing numbers we can’t substantiate in writing.
Problems solved
The mess
An order arrives by email, gets typed into a spreadsheet, then re-typed into the ERP, then summarised into a report. Every hop is a chance to be wrong, and nobody trusts the numbers by Friday.
What changed
A single intake that captures the record once, validates it at the door, and pushes it to every downstream system automatically.
The mess
Accounting, CRM, the warehouse tool, and the scheduling app each hold a piece of the truth. Reconciling them is somebody's whole week.
What changed
An integration layer plus one operational view that reads from all of them, flags mismatches, and becomes the place people actually work.
The mess
The workbook has 40 tabs, three macros nobody will touch, and a version named final_v7_USE_THIS. It runs a core part of the business and one wrong paste breaks it.
What changed
A proper application with the same logic, real validation, audit history, and permissions — usually with a familiar grid so the team isn't retrained from scratch.
Written up as patterns, not vendor stories · Full detail on a call
AI changed what’s possible
What once required weeks of design, scaffolding, and development can now often be demonstrated in a focused working session. That doesn’t make custom software less valuable. It means we can spend less of your money discovering whether the idea is worth building.
Processes that weren’t worth automating a few years ago are worth automating now. The bottleneck was never the database — it was everything arriving as unstructured mess: emails, scanned forms, free-text notes, exceptions that needed a human to read them.
Invoices, specs, inspection forms, and scans can be read and structured reliably, with humans reviewing only the exceptions.
Users can describe what they need instead of navigating twelve screens, which removes most of the training problem.
In our own development work, the output of a focused four-hour sprint can resemble what used to take weeks of design and build to demonstrate.
What hasn’t changed: knowing which parts of a workflow should stay human, and how to hand over software a company can live with for a decade. That part still takes experience — we’ve been at it since 1994.
Where this goes
Your people handle judgment. Your systems handle everything else.
Nothing here is a leap of faith. It’s three stages, in order, and stage one should stand on its own before you go further. You can stop after any of them.
Turn operational mess into measurable value
We map how the work actually happens and fix what's broken now — the duplicate entry, the workbook holding a department together, the approvals lost in email.
Systems and data start working together. One record, one source of truth, clean events moving between your ERP, accounting, CRM, and the tools your team already lives in.
Once the plumbing is honest, agents can execute the routine work across those systems — inside rules you set, with approvals and an audit trail.
Agentic-first operations
For thirty years, business software has meant humans driving screens: open the module, find the record, key the form, forward the email, tick the box. That model is starting to invert. An event happens in the business, and coordinated agents take the right actions across the systems you already own — while people handle the judgment calls.
Event
“Smith Co. paid their invoice.”
Agent
Matches the payment to the open invoice, checks the amount and any short-pay tolerance you've set, and reconciles it.
ERP
Invoice marked paid, credit hold released.
Accounting
Receipt recorded and reconciled to the bank feed.
CRM
Customer record and balance updated for whoever picks up the phone.
Downstream
Held order continues; collections follow-up cancelled.
Where a human steps in: A short-pay outside tolerance stops and routes to your controller with the evidence attached. Every action is logged, reversible, and bounded by rules you write.
Agents act inside thresholds, policies, and reason codes your team writes down. Anything outside them escalates.
Each action records what happened, why, which policy applied, and what it touched. Reversible by design.
Exceptions, credit decisions, customer relationships, anything with real discretion — those stay with your team, surfaced faster.
How this works
A 30-minute conversation about the process, not a sales call.
Fixed scope, fixed price, written down before anyone commits.
Working software every week or two. Your team uses it early.
Documentation, training, and code you own outright.
The next step
Show us one ugly business process. If we select it for a Build Sprint, we'll spend up to four development hours building a working proof of how we'd improve it — before asking you to hire us. It's a proof, not production software, and there's no obligation either way.
One process · One 30-minute interview · Up to four development hours