Huddersfield, UK · working nationwide

I build AI agents that do real jobs for small businesses.

I'm James Richards — an engineer (MEng, General Engineering) who designs, builds and runs AI systems that take work off your plate: compliance paperwork, lead handling, records chasing, monitoring. One clear outcome, checked by a human, priced simply. No jargon, no "AI strategy decks".

What I do

Pick the job that costs you the most evenings. I automate that one first.

AI agents that discharge a duty

Paperwork drafted, records chased, filings prepared, incidents flagged — one metered outcome delivered every week, always reviewed by a human before it reaches your customer.

Automation & integration

I connect the tools you already use — email, WhatsApp, spreadsheets, industry portals — so information moves itself instead of waiting for you at 9pm.

Engineering software

Control systems, embedded firmware, computer vision. For engineering firms that need someone who speaks both power systems and Python.

Proof of work

Things I've actually shipped — commercial software first, engineering projects after.

Twin-hull autonomous surface vehicle with GPS receiver and sensor array floating in a test pool
Computer vision

Autonomous surface vehicle

University team project: trained a YOLOv11 vision model to detect floating obstacles (wildlife, driftwood) so an uncrewed boat can navigate safely.

Robotics + AI

SO-101 robotic arm

Built and programmed the SO-101 robotic arm for AI-driven manipulation tasks.

Watch it working
Control systems

Rotary inverted pendulum

Swing-up and stabilisation of an inherently unstable system — real-time control engineering, from model to hardware.

Embedded

Micromouse

Autonomous maze-solving robot: embedded firmware, sensor fusion and path-finding on a hardware budget.

Systems / Rust

Bitcoin mining — Stratum V2

Built a working Bitcoin miner and work with the open-source Stratum V2 mining-protocol applications in Rust.

Watch it working
AI + automation

Signal to Trade — event-driven trading system

Ingests social-media posts in real time, has an LLM judge each one for market impact, and converts judgments into sized, stop-protected paper trades. 519 simulated trades, latency-decay and look-ahead-bias analysis — written up as an honest post-mortem.

Read the case study
Product

Sortura smart bin

A smart bin that identifies and sorts waste automatically — sensing, actuation and product design.

Watch it working
Sensing

Tremor sensor

University project: a tremor-measurement device — biomedical sensing and signal processing.

How working with me goes

Designed so you see value before you commit to anything.

A short call

Fifteen minutes to find the one job that eats your time — the paperwork, the chasing, the monitoring. If I can't help, I'll say so on the call.

Results in week one

I run the job myself first, with AI doing the heavy lifting and me checking every output. You see the finished work before any software exists.

Then it runs itself

What works gets automated and keeps running weekly. Simple price per outcome, cancel anytime, and I stay the engineer on the other end.

About

I'm completing an MEng in General Engineering, specialising in electrical engineering — and I've been building software the whole way through. That mix matters: the hard part of most automation isn't the AI, it's understanding the real-world process it has to respect (a controlled-drugs audit, a grid-connection application, a grant evidence pack). I build systems that hold up to inspection, not demos.