Build — we build it with you, then it's yours
A platform creates vendor dependency. A licence creates institutional capability.
Across professional services, multi-year co-innovation partnerships between domain firms and AI partners are becoming the model — Freshfields with Anthropic, Kirkland & Ellis with Palantir. The Dragonfly Co-Innovation Partnership starts from day-one access to the full Dragonfly methodology — a working starter kit, not a blank page. From there, we work with your team to build, extend, and customise workflows to your needs, while building your people's capability to run and develop them. And unlike a platform relationship, what you build transfers in: the capability becomes institutionally yours, running in your environment.
It begins with a kickoff strategic sprint on a live question, the licence installed where you work — cloud or sovereign — and your first capability cohort, all running concurrently. From day one your team is working on real analysis, not sitting in training rooms.
What the partnership includes.
The starter kit — full methodology from day one
Day-one access to the full Dragonfly methodology: 13 specialist lens agents, a layer of reviewer agents, 70+ analytical skills, and named workflows — all as readable, modifiable text files your team can inspect, audit, and extend. Ongoing updates as the methodology evolves with the underlying models; a perpetual snapshot licence after Year 3.
Co-developed workflows
From that starter kit, we work with your team to build, extend, and customise workflows to your needs — the analyses you run most often, increasingly co-designed, eventually built by your team independently. The starter kit is a starting library, not a ceiling.
Capability building
Analyst cohorts trained in three things simultaneously: strategic analysis methodology, agentic AI tradecraft (how to read an agent, write a skill, evaluate an output), and workflow design. Fluency is measured against Dragonfly's published 10-dimension AI Fluency Framework.
Years 2 and 3 run at a fraction of Year 1 as the capability beds in, and course and sprint fees credit toward a partnership on upgrade within 12 months. We run at most four partnerships at a time — depth of transfer is the product, and it does not scale thin. Indicative rates are on the rate card.
Led personally by the people who built it.
The same principals who built the methodology guide every partnership — from kickoff through workflow co-design and analyst training. No rotating bench.
Anthea Roberts
Founder, Director & CEO
Professor of international law and global governance. Author of Six Faces of Globalization (FT and Fortune Best Book, 2021). League of Scholars’ world’s leading international law scholar (2019). Taught at ANU, Harvard, Columbia, and LSE.
Sue Brake
Chair & Investment Vertical Lead
Former CIO of Australia’s A$300 billion Future Fund. One of the pioneers of the Total Portfolio Approach — estimated to improve fund performance by 1.0–1.5% per annum over the long term.
How one government partnership unfolded
From a single workflow to multi-year capability transfer.
Dragonfly was commissioned to build a single workflow on a strategic question of the client's choice. We developed the workflow, ran it, and presented the output.
The client asked for it to be re-run a week later. Then every three days. Then daily. That lived experience — having an analytical engine they could point at a real strategic question, see the output, iterate, re-run — convinced them this was a capability worth bringing in-house. It became a multi-year methodology licence, two capability cohorts of around 25 analysts each, and an ongoing co-build relationship as new analytical needs emerge.
What the alternatives cost.
Institutions weighing a partnership are usually weighing it against three alternatives.
An enterprise analytics platform
Recurring annual licenceVendor lock-in and no IP transfer — the capability is rented, never owned.
A strategy-house retainer
Recurring annual feesThe capability rotates off with the bench. When the engagement ends, the thinking leaves the building.
Building in-house from zero
3–5 specialist hires, 1–2 yearsSenior AI roles take months to fill, and the team must invent the analytical methodology while building the plumbing.
A partnership costs less per year than two senior analysts — and ends with your institution owning the analytical machinery: readable, modifiable, perpetual.
Thinking of building this yourselves?
Good — the instinct is right. Owning the judgment layer is exactly what we would tell you to do, and it is the premise the entire partnership is built on. The question is not whether to own it; it is whether to start from zero.
Internal teams building from scratch take on two jobs at once: standing up the plumbing, and inventing the analytical methodology — what to codify, how to encode expert tradecraft, how to make multi-lens synthesis hold up under board scrutiny. The second job is the hard one, and it is the one a working, already-proven system removes.
The partnership is the build-it-yourselves path — with a working starter kit, trained analysts, and a perpetual licence as the starting point instead of an empty repository.