An AI operations company.
The team that advises and ships.
YNDR is the rare firm that does both. We sit on the board and we sit at the keyboard. Mid-market through Fortune 100. Strategy that goes from the boardroom straight to working code, without a handoff to a separate vendor.
Founded by Chris Thomas. Anthropic-certified. Operational agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Headquartered in Atlanta, serving clients nationally.
The discipline of the boardroom.
The satisfaction of shipping.
Chris Thomas spent two decades inside the kind of engagements most advisors only describe. Enterprise consulting for Fortune 100 operators. Cross-functional builds spanning web infrastructure, computer vision, drones, and the early wave of AI deployments inside companies whose names you know. The pattern that kept repeating, year after year, was the gap between the deck the strategist handed over and the system the engineering team actually shipped. The strategy was sound. The implementation drifted. By the time anyone reconciled the two, the agent in production looked nothing like the agent on the slide.
That gap is the wedge YNDR was built to close. Operational agents are the right place to start because they are the place where the gap hurts most. A chatbot can be wrong and the worst that happens is a frustrated user. An agent that owns a workflow can be wrong and the worst that happens is a regulator on the phone. The difference between those two outcomes is not model selection. It is the discipline of the team that designed it, the handbook the agent follows, the security review it cleared, and the human still standing at the kill switch.
So Chris built a firm that does both halves of the work. Board-level advisory in the morning. Pull requests in the afternoon. He sits with operating partners and CFOs as a Fractional Chief AI Officer and AI Board Advisor, then walks back to a codebase and ships the agents the strategy called for. The same operator. The same playbook. The same throat to choke when something needs to change. That is the model. It is the only one that has ever made the deck and the running system tell the same story.
Five beliefs that decide what we refuse to ship.
Every operational agent we put in production has to clear these. They are not slogans. They are the lines we will walk away from an engagement to defend.
Agents are not chatbots.
A chatbot answers a question. An operational agent owns a workflow. It picks tools, calls APIs, writes to systems of record, and escalates to a human when the policy says so. That is a different category of system, and it deserves a different category of discipline.
Strategy without code is a deck.
The recommendation that never ships is just a slide. We refuse the separation between the team that decides and the team that builds. The same operator who sets the AI strategy writes the agent that puts it into production.
Security before governance.
Governance maps the rules. Security is what stops the breach. Prompt injection, the lethal trifecta, RAG access leaks, shadow AI, key hygiene. Every agent we ship clears the runtime defenses before it ever touches a compliance binder.
Every agent ships with a handbook.
Two documents per agent. A handbook the agent follows. An ops manual the human supervisors follow. If you cannot point to both, you do not have an agent. You have a demo.
The team that advises is the team that ships.
One throat to choke. One playbook. The advisor who sits on your board is the same person whose hands are in the codebase. That is the only way the strategy and the running system stay honest with each other.
Four gates between idea and production.
Every operational agent we ship moves through these four gates in this order. Reverse them and the project stalls. The long-form briefs live in our artifacts library — start with the 90-day plan for portco CAIOs or what ships with every agent.
Strategy
Decide what AI actually does for you. Workflow map, build vs. buy, the metric the CFO will sign.
Build
Design the agent, the handbook, and the human SOP. Tool inventory, escalation rules, eval set, HITL gates.
Security
Runtime defenses for the systems your business actually runs on. Lethal-trifecta splits, RAG controls, sandboxes, key hygiene.
Governance
Rules your agents and your people both follow. Audit trail, kill switch, policy mapped to EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001.
Atlanta. Serving nationally.
YNDR is headquartered in North Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta gives us proximity to a deep bench of operators across the Southeast and quick reach into mid-market and Fortune 100 clients in New York, San Francisco, and the cities in between. We engage on-site when an engagement calls for it and run remote-first when it does not.
We work with private equity firms covering portfolio companies across multiple geographies, with mid-market operators rolling out their first agents, and with Fortune 100 teams that need an embedded board-level voice to cut through vendor noise. Same playbook, scaled to fit.
Tell us what you're trying to ship.
Thirty minutes. No pitch deck. We map your AI surface area, name the agents that pay back fastest, and tell you honestly whether we are the right team for what you're trying to do. If we are not, we will tell you who is.