Category 05 / Managed Data Teams

A data team that already knows your schema.

The continuous engagement model. A dedicated team — named operators, a named delivery lead, a dedicated QA layer — embedded in your comms stack, trained on your schema, scaling up and down with your pipeline. An extension of your AI org, staffed in Nairobi.

ISO 27001 Certified · Cert No. 452AGI102121
Engagement
ContinuousNot a project SOW
Team
Dedicated4–40+ operators per account
Lead
NamedSits in your comms stack
Ramp
DaysNot quarters

Operating model

A team, not a transaction.

01 / Named
Named delivery lead on every engagement, not a ticket queue
02 / Embedded
Sits in your Slack, Linear, or Asana — not over email
03 / Calibrated
Trained on your schema, your QA criteria, your edge cases
04 / Continuous
Ongoing engagement, not quarterly SOWs

What you get

A real team. Real people. Measurable output.

Not a platform subscription. Not a marketplace of strangers. A named group of full-time operators accountable to a lead, to a rubric, and to you.

On the floor ● LIVE Four Impact Outsourcing team members gathered around a laptop on the Nairobi delivery floor, reviewing a live annotation task.
IMG_501 · TEAM_ROOM Nairobi · Kenya
01

A named delivery lead.

One senior person, accountable to you. Not a rotating account manager, not a shared inbox. The same person on week 1 and week 52.

02

A trained operator pool.

4 to 40+ full-time operators depending on your pipeline. All calibrated against your gold set before a single production record touches their queue.

03

A dedicated QA layer.

Reviewer seniority above operators, holding the rubric and the inter-annotator agreement line. The same team that ships the labels is not the team that signs off on them.

04

Your tooling. Not ours.

We work in CVAT, Labelbox, V7, Encord, Supervisely, or your internal tool. We don’t force a platform on you, and we don’t rent you one.

05

Embedded comms.

Delivery lead sits in your Slack, Linear, or Asana. Weekly syncs, async standups, exception escalation paths defined before production starts.

06

Written SLAs and rubrics.

Throughput, accuracy, turnaround, exception handling — all documented in the SOW, all tracked against numbers, all reviewed in the weekly.

How engagements work

We scope. Calibrate. Deliver. Continuously.

Engagements have a shape, not a fixed scope. Five phases to get from your first brief to a team delivering into your pipeline — then the same team scales with you.

Phase 01 / Gate

Discovery

We read your schema, your task documentation, your current QA standards. Understand what you’re actually training.

1 week
No cold quotes
Phase 02 / Work

Scope

A written SOW: team size, ramp plan, SLAs, rubrics, tooling integration. You approve it before we staff.

1–2 weeks
Client sign-off
Phase 03 / Gate

Calibration

The operator pool trains on your gold-standard data. IAA benchmarked before anyone touches production records.

2–3 weeks
IAA threshold pass
Phase 04 / Work

Production

Weekly delivery cadence, reported metrics, continuous recalibration. Schema evolutions handled in-team, not with a new SOW.

Ongoing
Weekly reporting
Phase 05 / Signal

Scale

Add operators for volume spikes, reduce for quieter cycles. The team flexes; the institutional knowledge stays.

As needed
No re-learning
Gate phase · pass/fail against a written criterion Work phase · produces a measured artifact

How this differs

Not a marketplace. Not a project shop.

Buyers evaluating us are also evaluating crowdsourced platforms and project agencies. Here’s where the operating model diverges.

Alternative 01

Crowdsourced marketplaces

Labelers you can’t name, on a platform that owns the relationship.

  • Anonymous labelers, high churn
  • Platform-defined schema constraints
  • No direct accountability
  • Quality drift between batches
  • Edge cases silently labelled wrong
Optimised for — platform margins
Managed Data Teams · Ours

A named team. Your schema. Continuous.

Dedicated operators, accountable to a named lead, embedded in your stack. The same team, scaling with your pipeline.

  • Named delivery lead, named operators
  • Trained on your schema before production
  • Dedicated QA layer, separate from delivery
  • Continuous engagement, not project SOW
  • Scales up and down with your pipeline
  • Sits in your Slack, Linear, or Asana
Optimised for — your model quality
Alternative 02

Project agencies

Fixed-scope engagements that end when the statement-of-work ends.

  • Fixed SOW, hard cutoffs
  • Handoffs between engagements
  • Re-learning your schema every time
  • No continuity when volume spikes
  • Institutional knowledge walks out
Optimised for — agency utilisation

When this fits

The operating model for teams shipping AI.

Managed Data Teams is the right tier when you’ve outgrown project work, and where data quality is tied directly to what your model actually does.

01 / Scale

You’re scaling.

Annotation volume has outgrown the spot-market or crowd approach. You need dedicated capacity that flexes with the roadmap, not one that caps at a platform limit.

02 / Quality

Quality is product-critical.

A mislabelled edge case costs you a deployment. You need a team accountable to your rubric and your gold reference — not a tool reporting on itself.

03 / Continuity

Pipelines, not projects.

Your data needs don’t end at V1. Schema evolves, edge cases accumulate, training cycles continue. You need an operations partner, not a vendor.

04 / Security

Compliance is table stakes.

Training data is sensitive. You need ISO 27001, real access control, and an operator pool that has passed more than a click-through NDA.

One account, sustained

What continuous engagement actually produces.

Numbers from our longest-running Managed Team engagement. One team, one schema lineage, four years.

Account review Impact Outsourcing operator working focused at a dual-screen workstation during an account review.
IMG_502 · ACCOUNT_REVIEW Nairobi · Kenya
Anchor engagement · Named under NDA

Three years. One team. One million records.

For one of our longest-running clients, a dedicated team has processed over one million records across a relationship spanning three years. Operators who know the schema the way the client’s own engineers do. When the schema evolves, the team evolves with it. No new SOW. No re-learning. Client named under NDA.

Engagement length
3+ yrs
Records processed
1M+
IAA average
0.94
Operators on account
30+
Schema evolutions
12+
New SOWs required
0

Scope with us

Send us your pipeline. We’ll scope the team.

We read your task schema, your volume requirements, your QA standards. Then we staff and deliver against them. No cold quotes. No shelf-priced seats.

Already running a crowd or a project shop? Graduate to a team that stays.