DEK Consulting Inc. Nova Scotia, Canada

Systems for organizations that have to show where the answer came from.

Fractional technology leadership and applied AI. I work with organizations whose documents carry real consequence — regulators, professional bodies, and businesses operating under obligations they have to be able to evidence.

What I do

Technology leadership

Senior technical judgment without a full-time hire. Architecture and build direction, engineering leadership, vendor and platform evaluation, and getting stalled projects moving again.

Most engagements are fixed-scope and run weeks rather than quarters.1

Grounded AI assistants

Assistants built on an organization's own documents, not on the open internet. Every answer cites the source it came from, and the system declines to answer rather than guess when the corpus doesn't cover the question.

Separate audiences — staff and the public — can be served from one corpus with different visibility.2

How I build

  • Cite, never interpret

    The system points to the standard. It does not decide what the standard means. Questions that require professional judgment are routed to a person, by design rather than by instruction.

  • Fail closed

    When permissions, budgets, or confidence are uncertain, the system stops. The default is refusal, not a best guess — because a confident wrong answer costs more than no answer.

  • Evidence over claims

    Nothing is reported as working on the strength of a description. Test output, database state, and diffs are the evidence; prose is not. The same standard applies to what I tell clients.

Security & privacy

Tenant isolation, role-based access with an explain endpoint, full audit trail, and encryption in transit and at rest. Data residency is documented end to end — including where model and embedding calls are processed, which is the part most vendors leave out.

Architecture and security documentation is available on request, along with a current statement of what has and has not yet been independently certified.3

Background

Damien Steiger is President of DEK Consulting Inc. He has led software development organizations as a VP, delivered enterprise consulting engagements in regulated sectors including anti-money-laundering reporting, and designed and built a production retrieval system serving a commercial SaaS platform.4 He works from Cape Breton.

Get in touch

damien@dekconsulting.ca

Notes

  1. Engagements are scoped and priced as projects with a defined deliverable, not as an open-ended retainer. Scope, timeline, and cost are agreed before work begins.
  2. Built as a multi-tenant platform: each client's documents are isolated at the database level, and no client's corpus is used to answer another's questions or to train any model.
  3. DEK Consulting does not currently hold SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification. Where a control is inherited from a subprocessor rather than independently attested, the documentation says so.
  4. Prior work is described in general terms. Client systems and materials remain the property of those clients.