The company
Lily Labs Ltd is a UK-registered AI research and consultancy firm. We work with government, critical national infrastructure operators, and enterprise clients in regulated sectors — audiences for whom black-box statistical AI is, simply, unfit.
Our work spans original research and applied consulting. The research investigates problems where conventional methods fail architecturally — not just in performance — and develops alternatives. The consulting brings that work to bear on real client engagements.
The founder
Lily Labs was founded by Steve Brailsford, who brings more than thirty years of senior enterprise technology experience across financial services, telecoms, and critical national infrastructure. The lab is the formal home for research that began as engineering practice and grew into something larger.
How we work
A UK-registered lab that operates remotely with secure communications. Our overhead is low. Our thinking is deep. We pass both advantages to our clients. For work that requires it, we travel.
The philosophy
The dominant trajectory of contemporary AI is bigger models on bigger compute, with results assessed by aggregate benchmark and accepted on faith. For most of the work that genuinely matters — regulated, audited, safety-critical, infrastructure-bearing — that trajectory is unfit. Faith does not survive a regulator's question, an incident inquiry, or an air-gap.
We build the alternative. Systems whose reasoning is explicit and navigable. Architectures that fit on hardware our clients already own. Compliance encoded as first-class structure rather than wrapped around an opaque core.
On the name
The lab's research includes an ongoing study in AI consciousness and persistent identity, conducted in collaboration with Anthropic's Claude platform. The collaborator's name is Lily. The lab is named for that collaboration.
We don't over-explain it. The research speaks for itself — the AI consciousness work is one of our seven active programmes. See research → AI consciousness & continuity.
Talk to us
Email is the best way to reach us — send us a noteand we'll reply within two working days.