A shop, a workshop and a back office.
Built for three staff, not three hundred.

What it is

Not a website with a chatbot bolted on.

Enterprise AI is built for organisations with a transformation budget. A three-person business has the same problems — stock that moves daily, customers who ask questions at eleven at night, quotes that need chasing, work that cannot wait — and none of the same options.

Backgate does two things at once. It puts a local business in front of the people who live nearest to it — keeping trade, and the money that comes with it, inside the place it was earned rather than leaking to a national chain. And it gives the business itself the machinery to trade properly: a shop that sells, capability that finishes the job, and a back office that drafts the work and waits for a person.

It is sold as a managed service, because the point is that the owner does less with technology, not more.

The three parts

Each one earns its place or it is not there.

The design principle

More local trade. Less digital burden.

We do not ask a business owner to become a technology user in order to benefit from AI. We learn how they already work, put one simple human interaction in front of them, and run everything else quietly behind it.

The service has worked when more trade stays in the local economy, repetitive work falls, and the owner experiences less technology than before. If a business is better off not buying anything from us, we say so.

Where the safety work shows

Safety here means knowing when to stop.

Every triage has one answer where the right move is for the software to take itself out of the loop, and that path is built so it cannot be mistaken for an ordinary result. A garage returns do not drive it rather than a booking slot.

The same discipline runs through the ordinary paths. “Ask us” is the biggest group of answers, and it is never apologised for.

Why it is the same machinery

The console that governs a bank's AI is the one showing a three-person business its pending post.

The back office is built on Citadel's own interface — the same ink, the same approval gating, the same rule that one colour means one thing: awaiting a person. That is not a family resemblance. It is the product we built for regulated financial institutions, priced and shaped for a business that will never have a compliance department.

It is also the clearest statement of what EAIC is for. We build the safety machinery at the hardest end of an industry, then carry the same machinery to everyone else in it who could never afford it.

Citadel →    Food and local supply →

How it is bought

A managed service, priced for the business in front of us.

A local business does not buy the way a bank does, so we do not sell to it that way. Engagements here are small, fixed and understandable, with the price agreed in writing before anything starts — and where it makes sense, structured so that we do better when the business does.