Free your team from the X that drains them. Truly AI-enabled, finally.
Your seniors got into rail to solve problems and exercise engineering judgement, not to feel stuck in admin. Today they spend half their week on work AI can already do better. The work they joined for waits.
Form A/B/C/G. Cat 3 comments. Standards searching. Moving data from one template to another. Repetitive, error-prone, soul-crushing. The work AI can do better, done by your most expensive people. The work they were hired to do queues behind it.
Tenders are starting to ask AI questions the way they asked BIM questions a decade ago. Your last response had to bluff. The next one will lose. Your clients are starting to audit your AI readiness. The window closes fast.
Two people hold the whole firm together. They are the system rather than enabled by one. When they take leave, the programme stalls. When they burn out or leave, the operation collapses. Your risk register is your senior org chart. You know it.
Every Cat 3 comment, every rework cycle, every late deliverable. You see the P&L. You do not see the AI-native competitor’s P&L improving every quarter.
Rail runs in peaks and troughs. Today the only way to scale your core team’s capability is to hire. Every peak forces new hires. Every trough turns those hires into a risk you cannot carry. The hire-rehire cycle bleeds margin. The alternative is a system that enables your core team to cover more, without growing headcount.
And you are the leader who took them there.
18 months from now your team is doing engineering, not admin. Your firm runs on a system that compounds with every project.
Your seniors do the work that compounds. Junior engineers get mentored. The work that drains the firm is gone. The work that builds it gets done.
Every project leaves the firm sharper. Standards reusable. Lessons that stick. Tenders that cite evidence. Win rate moves. Margin recovers. The firm stops running uphill.
You become the leader who took your firm into the AI era. The one whose board sees the curve. Career-defining. Career-proofing. Your name shows up in the conversations that matter.
AI creates opportunities to improve tasks and workflows in ways that are beneficial for people. Human centred tools can reduce manual and repetitive tasks, support or automate activities that add limited value, freeing people to apply their judgement and experience on those activities that matter most. Used appropriately, AI should make day-to-day work better, safer and less administratively burdensome.
Domain knowledge, engineering capability, AI-native discipline. Most advisors live in one. We operate where the three meet.
Ten years on both sides of the rail delivery table. Over 100 railway businesses across the client-side governance seat and the supplier-side delivery seat. Same patterns kept repeating: senior engineers buried in compliance admin, quality that depends on who’s in the room, growth that stalls the moment the best people run out of hours.
In 2023 I started using AI to scale a rail consultancy from zero to approximately £1m ARR by 2025, and won one of 16 tactical design partner seats on Southern Renew Enterprise. The tools aren’t theory. They’re how I got here.
I founded AutomateX to bring that capability to the rest of UK rail. We automate the X that absorbs senior engineering hours, so the experts can focus on what only they can do.
“We should learn to say no to the things AI can do better.”
Lived delivery and recognition.
Formal engineering authority.
Discipline, not tool-use.
Your X is the error-prone, repetitive, and time-consuming friction in your workflow, often unique to your operational context and organisation type. Move the lens, hover any point to see how AutomateX resolves it. Click to pin.
We help you diagnose your X in three depths, pick the one that fits where you are. The Assessment surfaces candidate friction. The CPD opens the conversation. The Workshop digs deep. Each step credits forward.
Know where you stand. Surface your candidate X.
A 5-pillar readiness report that flags your candidate friction points and how AI-ready your firm is to tackle them. A cohort-matched next step. £50 off the CPD. £300 off the Workshop.
The AI-in-rail landscape, with your team in the room.
A group session covering the current AI landscape in UK rail, real deployments to learn from, and a working framework for spotting your X internally. Live Q&A throughout. CPD certificate.
Find the workflow worth automating first, with the business case to back it.
A hosted, structured workshop that walks your team through identifying top friction points across work-winning, delivery, assurance, operations, anywhere they sit. Output: a tailored Find Your X Report with options assessed and ROIs costed, so you know which one to automate first. Workshop fee 100% credited toward Build within 60 days.
Already know your X? Book a discovery call to discuss how we build and implement it.
Not experiments. Not prototypes. Production deployments solving real problems in live rail delivery.
Drone, 360° camera, and laser scanner captured a national station network in weeks. AI surfaced hidden defects. Trains never stopped.
Automated linear take-off from rail engineering drawings. AI extracts measurements with full audit trail. Hours not days, with cited evidence per line.
AI co-pilot for design reviews, requirements drafting, and verification traceability. The golden thread stays unbroken from design intent through to operational acceptance.
A rail-specific knowledge graph trained on standards, taxonomy, and project history. Drove tender response quality and efficiency. Every output cited, grounded in your domain.
Doc assistance for PACE-compliant rail forms. Section-by-section drafting with cited evidence and compliance gates. Currently in pilot.
The questions rail teams ask us most. If yours is not here, drop it through the chat or book a 30-minute consultation off the back of the AI Readiness Assessment.
Two paths depending on where you are. If you already know your X, take the AI Readiness Assessment and book a 30-minute consultation off the back of it. We’ll walk through your results together and map a clear first move.
If you’re earlier in your thinking, we recommend forming an internal AI working group and running a structured self-diagnosis. AutomateX can guide that working group through a proven method to identify your X, typically delivered as a 1-hour CPD or a half-day Workshop.
AutomateX is a custom-build service business, not a SaaS product. We diagnose your X, then build the AI-enabled solution that fits your operational context, your data, and your assurance environment. Each engagement is bespoke. Our strength is at the intersection of rail domain expertise and AI implementation, applied to your specific friction.
For teams that want a packaged AI tool rather than a custom build, we’re developing Scribtive™ and PACE OS™ as adjacent product offerings. Those are on the waitlist. The core AutomateX engagement remains custom build.
About 1 week to Diagnose. Up to 2 weeks for Alpha build and validation against retrospective data. Around 4 weeks for Beta build and independent blind evaluation. Then 3 to 6 months from Deploy to a live, fully assured workflow.
Complexity moves these. A tightly-scoped Form A automation lands sooner. A multi-discipline Operate & Evolve programme takes longer.
Pricing depends on what you need. The Diagnose phase has two published options:
Not every team needs this phase. Many already know their X and want to go straight to the Build phase.
For build engagements, pricing is outcome-based, not input-based. Every build is different, sized against the friction we’re removing and the value of the solution. We quote case by case. Talk to us directly for a quote on your specific situation.
Your data stays in the UK. Uploaded documents are stored in a relational database and cloud object storage with our UK-based infrastructure provider. Document content is anonymised at ingest. Un-anonymised data is only ever visible from the user account that uploaded it.
AutomateX is ICO-registered and operates under ISO/IEC 42001-aligned controls.
ISO/IEC 42001 is the new international standard for AI management systems, the AI-governance equivalent of ISO 27001 for information security. For AutomateX it means three things in practice:
1. Documented framing. Every AI-enabled workflow we deploy has a framing artefact covering scope, hazards, success criteria, and acceptance thresholds, agreed by your sponsor before build starts.
2. Audit-traced output. The model version, the original wording, and any accept/override decision are all logged per artefact.
3. Drift evaluation. We re-run evaluations on a regular cadence to catch model drift before it surfaces in production.
Rail-grade assurance discipline applied to AI delivery.
Domain knowledge is where the value sits. AI tooling is increasingly commoditised. What’s defensible is the rail expertise that knows what good looks like, where the friction actually lives, and how the assurance process really works.
We don’t want to wait for AI generalists to figure out rail. We’re rail insiders building at the implementation layer ourselves, so solutions land in workflows that engineers actually use.
Every rail firm has an X. Larger firms typically get most value from productivity and engineering-leverage gains, freeing senior judgement from admin. Smaller firms get most value from removing single-point-of-failure bottlenecks and reducing rework.
The real constraint isn’t firm size. It’s whether you’re ready to use AI responsibly and have the appetite for change. If you do, we can help.
The AI Readiness Assessment measures where you are today. The P.A.C.E-D™ method shows where AI adoption can take your firm over the next two to three years, and how the moves sequence. Most rail businesses sit on the Status Quo line. The curve below is the compounding path out.
Find out where you sit on this curve.
Every claim we make is grounded in published research from the world’s leading institutions. This isn’t opinion. It’s evidence.
The AI-enabled operating system for railway project delivery. Built by a railway engineer, for railway engineers. Let engineers do engineering, not admin.
Generate and assure PACE assurance documentation (e.g. Form A/B/G/H, CR-T, ITP or customised deliverables) with confidence and traceability. Documents that significantly improve approval rate and reduce administrative burden without added overhead.
Instantly retrieve past decisions, standards, and lessons learned across your organisation.
Built for roles under NR/L2/RSE/02009, guiding teams through PACE compliance with zero friction.
Start with the AI Readiness Assessment. It is free, takes about 8 minutes, and lands a tailored report in your inbox. From there, book a 30-minute consultation to walk through your results.
Drop your details and ask anything. We typically reply in seconds during UK working hours.
