Unlocking Tech
01 / Services / Integration

AI integration services, wired to your real systems of record.

Our AI integration services are the plumbing that makes AI real: the model works in a demo but can't see your data, write back to your CRM or ERP, or be trusted with your permissions model — so we connect LLMs, retrieval (RAG) and AI agents to your live systems, safely. No rip-and-replace.

Illustrative exampleSwitch between dry-run, write and rollbackOne CRM write, with permissions, dry-run and rollback

Systems and permissions

  • HubSpotCRM
    Reads:
    deals, contacts
    Writes:
    stage, next step, note
  • ERPe.g. Primavera, PHC
    Reads:
    customer record, open invoices
    Writes
    Read-only
  • Databaseinternal SQL
    Reads:
    order history
    Writes
    Read-only

The AI writes as:ai-integration · its own scoped user

Checks before the write

  • Only fields inside the AI user's scope
  • The stage exists in the pipeline and the move is allowed
  • Customer confirmed in the ERP (tax ID matches)
  • No duplicate write (idempotency key)

Mode

Nothing is written. The integration produces exactly the payload it would send, and a person reviews the diff before approving.

Approved and written through the HubSpot API as the AI's own user. Who wrote what, and why, is logged.

If something is wrong, the previous values are restored from the audit trail. The rollback is logged too.

Trigger: Customer email asking for longer payment terms

Record: Deal D-1042 · Example Customer Ltd

Stage
before: Proposal sentafter: Negotiation (proposed)
Next step
before: —after: Review payment terms with the customer (proposed)
Note
before: —after: Summary of the customer's email (proposed)
Amount
€12,000out of scope: the AI never writes this field

Audit trail

  1. 01dry-run · payload stored · awaiting review
  2. 02write · 3 fields · reason: customer email · approved by account manager
  3. 03rollback · 3 fields restored · requested by account manager

Fictitious systems, record and values. The path is the real one: what the AI may read and write, the checks before the write, and the log that lets you reverse it.

02 /

Selected work

Case study· United Kingdom

Agritech · IoT precision fertilizer platform

IoT-driven precision fertilizer platform for large-scale arable farming.

Problem
Sensor data without agronomic intelligence is noise.
Approach
The complete fertilizer decision loop: measure, analyse, recommend, apply, verify.
Outcome
From blanket application to field-level intelligence.
  • 23%Fertilizer cost reduction in first season
  • 12%Yield improvement per hectare
  • 850+Sensor nodes deployed across the operation
  • NVZCompliance fully documented end-to-end
European UnionHospital Management SaaS · Real-time facilities & patient records

Real-time facilities reservation and patient records SaaS for hospital operators.

  • Real-timeLive occupancy view across all wards and rooms
PortugalSeed Real Estate · AI deal-management workflows

AI-powered deal management and financial reconciliation for a real estate investment team.

2AI workflows orchestrated in production
03 / At a glance
The short answer

Unlocking Tech is an AI engineering company based in Lisbon, Portugal, providing AI integration services to SMEs and scale-ups in Portugal, the UK and the rest of Europe. We connect large language models — OpenAI's GPT models, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini — and AI agents to the systems you already run: CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, ERPs, databases and internal APIs. Every integration carries your record-level permissions through to the AI layer and ships write-back with validation, a dry-run mode, an audit trail and rollback. A single read-only path to one clean system takes a few weeks; larger scopes are fixed in writing, milestone by milestone, after a 30–60 minute technical assessment.

Engineer-led technical assessment, not a sales call
30–60min
Single read-only path to one clean system
A fewweeks
Write-backs validated, logged and reversible
100%
Not juniors. Senior engineers carry the permissions model through to the AI layer.
Senior
Real flow proven end-to-end before we widen scope
1
04/What you get

Everything you need.Wired into reality.

Not a demo against a stale export. AI connected to your live systems of record, with read/write you can trust, a permissions model that holds, and a runbook your team owns.

Real data, both directions

  • AI that reads your live systems of record

    Current CRM, ERP, database and warehouse data — not a CSV export or a copy that's a week stale.

  • Write-back you can trust

    When AI updates a record or triggers a workflow, it ships with validation, a dry-run mode, an audit trail and rollback — so a bad output can't silently corrupt your system of record.

Permissions and reliability

  • A permissions model that holds at the AI layer

    Record-level access carried through retrieval, so no user — and no model — ever sees data they shouldn't.

  • Pipelines that survive the real world

    Rate limits, retries, idempotency, schema-change detection and error queues with replay. It doesn't quietly break on a Tuesday.

Nothing replaced, all yours

  • No rip-and-replace

    It runs on the stack you already have — on-prem or cloud, alongside your existing tools. We integrate into reality, we don't re-platform it.

  • A system your team owns

    An architecture doc, monitoring, alerting and a written runbook — so you can operate it without us when you're ready.

05/How we work

Map it. Connect one path.Then to production, fast.

Five steps from a read-only assessment to a staged cutover — your data proves the auth, latency and cost before we widen scope.

  1. 01ASSESS
    Technical assessment

    30–60 minutes with an engineer, then read-only access to the systems in scope. We map the data, the systems of record, the auth model, rate limits and the compliance constraints — and tell you what's actually integrable, what's blocked, and where the real risk is. If integration isn't your bottleneck, we say so here.

  2. 02PLAN
    Integration plan and data contract

    Written architecture: which systems connect, the direction of data flow, the retrieval design, the permissions model and the failure modes. Fixed milestones and a success metric, in writing, before any code.

  3. 03CONNECT
    Connect one path end-to-end

    We wire a single real flow through the whole stack — one system, one data path, into the AI layer and back — in staging. This proves the auth, permissions, latency and cost on your actual data before we widen scope.

  4. 04HARDEN
    Harden and widen

    Add the remaining systems and flows, add retries, idempotency and rate-limit handling, lock down permissions and audit logging, load-test against real volumes and dry-run the write-backs. Weekly demos on your data throughout.

  5. 05SHIP
    Ship and handover

    Production cutover, usually staged or dual-run, with monitoring and alerting live and the runbook written. We stay accountable through stabilization; ongoing operation can roll into Support & Scale or back to your team.

06/Who it's for

We're not for everyone.We’re for teams wiring AI into the real stack.

If any of these sound familiar, we should talk.

01

The demo works, production doesn't

Founder or CTO with an AI feature stuck in isolation

You're dealing with

  • Impressive in isolation, useless in production
  • Reads a stale export, can't write back
  • Not tied into your auth

What you're after

You don't need a new model — you need it wired into the real stack.

Outcome

The demo becomes a feature your systems actually run.

02

AI can't touch your data because of where it lives

Data spread across ERP, legacy on-prem and SaaS

You're dealing with

  • Data scattered across ERP, legacy DB and SaaS tools
  • A real PII or data-residency regime
  • No way to rip-and-replace

What you're after

You need someone senior who integrates into messy reality and carries the permissions model through to the AI layer.

Outcome

AI reaches your data without breaking your compliance constraints.

03

You need retrieval grounded in your own systems

Internal AI that answers from your data and acts in your tools

You're dealing with

  • Support, search or an agent that updates records
  • Must never retrieve a record a user shouldn't see
  • The hard part is retrieval, permissions and write-back

What you're after

You want internal AI that answers from your data and acts in your tools — not just a better prompt.

Outcome

Grounded answers and safe actions inside your own tools.

We work with a few companies at a time.
If this is you, let's build it right.

Senior engineers. No handovers. No fluff.

07 / In depth

07.1AI integration services

What do AI integration services include?

AI integration services cover five things, and a real quote reflects all of them: mapping your systems of record and deciding which one is authoritative for each field; the retrieval design, including how record-level permissions travel with the data so the model can never surface something the user has no right to open in the source system; the write-back path, with validation, a dry-run mode, an audit trail and rollback; the pipeline that keeps it alive — rate limits, retries, idempotency, schema-change detection, error queues you can replay; and the handover, meaning an architecture doc, monitoring, alerting and a runbook your team can operate without us.

Read more

The part teams underestimate is the second and third: reading data is easy, and reading it with the permissions model intact while writing back safely is where the engineering actually goes.

Types of AI integration services

Five patterns cover almost every AI integration. Generative AI integration: a large language model (LLM) inside your product or internal tool, called through its API. RAG over your own data: documents, tickets and records indexed so the model answers from approved sources, with permissions intact. AI inside your CRM and ERP: classification, enrichment and drafting on the records your team already works in. AI agents with tool access: the model calls typed actions — create a deal, post a draft invoice, open a ticket — under approval rules. And AI in data pipelines: scoring, extraction or categorisation as a step between systems. Underneath, it is still classic enterprise integration, application integration and data integration — APIs, events, queues and one source of truth per field.

How much do AI integration services cost, and how long do they take?

Project-based with fixed milestones agreed in writing after a 30–60 minute technical assessment — not a day rate, and not a per-seat fee. A single read-only path into one clean system is a few weeks. Write-back across several systems, with a real permissions and audit regime, is a larger engagement and we scope it milestone by milestone before you commit. The biggest cost variable is not the AI, it is the age and quality of the systems: a documented REST API with a sandbox is cheap to integrate, and a legacy ERP with no sandbox, no test data and an undocumented API is the line item that moves the number. The assessment exists to tell you which one you have before you sign anything.

07.2Generative AI and CRM integration

Generative AI integration: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini inside your systems

Generative AI integration means calling a model through its API from your own systems, not pasting data into a chat window.

Read more

We stay model-agnostic: OpenAI's GPT models, Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini are chosen per task on quality, cost, latency and where the data may be processed — a model hosted in an EU region, such as Azure OpenAI, when processing has to stay in the EU. Prompts, retrieval and tool definitions live in your codebase, versioned and tested against an evaluation set, so switching models is a configuration change and a test run, not a rebuild. On data use: the providers' business APIs don't train on your inputs by default, but the terms of your exact tier are checked in the assessment.

AI CRM integration: HubSpot, Salesforce and Dynamics

AI CRM integration services connect a model to the records your sales and service teams live in, so the AI works on live deals and contacts instead of an export. Typical jobs: score and route inbound leads, enrich contacts and companies, summarise calls and email threads onto the record, draft follow-ups for a person to send, and keep pipeline fields clean. In production for OmniTrade Brasil, an agent reads 1,200 CSV files a month and writes only the qualified leads into HubSpot; for Grupo Filtrarte, lead routing runs across HubSpot, Outlook and WhatsApp. Whatever the CRM — HubSpot, Salesforce or Dynamics 365 — the rules are the same: the AI writes through the API with its own scoped user, every change is logged, and anything ambiguous lands in a queue for a person.

AI integration examples

Three integrations running in production. Seed Real Estate: bank statements reconciled against InvoiceXpress invoices, OpenAI models categorising each transaction and Airtable as the system of record, in an autonomous 6-hour cycle. OmniTrade Brasil: construction-project CSVs scored against configurable rules and pushed into HubSpot, 1,200 files a month, with screening down from days to hours. And on the data integration side, a UK agritech operation: a field-sensor network feeding an edge processing layer and an agronomist dashboard, which cut fertiliser cost by 23% in the first season. The pattern is the same every time — one authoritative system per field, a single path proven end to end, then wider scope.

07.3Enterprise system integration

Systems we integrate with

In production today: HubSpot, Airtable, ClickUp, Slack, Outlook, WhatsApp, Google Sheets and InvoiceXpress, alongside OpenAI models.

Read more

Beyond those, what decides the effort is the integration surface, not the brand: CRMs such as Salesforce and Dynamics 365; ERPs such as SAP, Odoo, Dynamics 365 Business Central and, in Portugal, PHC and Primavera; Postgres and other SQL databases, data warehouses, and internal REST or SOAP APIs. A documented REST API with a sandbox is the cheap case; a legacy ERP with an undocumented API is where the budget goes. An iPaaS such as MuleSoft, Boomi, Make or n8n earns its place when many systems share many flows — for two or three systems, direct APIs are simpler to own.

How do you integrate AI with an ERP or CRM that has a bad API?

Enterprise system integration means connecting systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and there are three patterns we use, in this order of preference.

  1. First, direct API integration: if the system has a usable API, this is the cheapest and by far the most reliable option, and it is worth arguing for even when it means waiting on a vendor.
  2. Second, a read replica or an event and queue layer with a staging table: use this when the API exists but is rate-limited, slow or unreliable, so your AI reads from something you control and the source system is written to on your own schedule.
  3. Third, and only as a last resort, driving the user interface the way a person would, which is what classic RPA does: it works on systems with no API at all, and it breaks whenever a screen changes, so we treat it as a stopgap with a documented replacement plan rather than an architecture. Most system estates end up as a mix, chosen per system rather than as a single company-wide decision.

What governance does enterprise system integration need?

Four checkpoints, and we will not ship without them. Permissions: record-level access from the source system is carried through retrieval, so authorisation is enforced where the data lives rather than re-implemented in the AI layer. Data boundaries: before anything connects, we establish what counts as personal or regulated data under GDPR, where it is allowed to be processed, and what must never leave your infrastructure — for EU companies that usually decides the hosting question outright. Write safety: every write-back has validation, a dry-run mode, an audit trail naming the actor and the reason, and a rollback path, so a bad model output cannot quietly corrupt a system of record. Observability: logs, alerting on error-queue depth and schema drift, and a written runbook, so the team can tell the difference between the integration being down and the source system being down. If you have an existing security review or a DPO, these are the artefacts they will ask for, and producing them at the end costs several times what producing them by design costs.

What do the rollout phases look like for a complex workflow?

We stage it so the risky assumptions fail early and cheaply. Phase one is read-only against a single system in staging, which proves the auth model, the latency and the real token cost on your data before anyone has written a line of production write-back. Phase two adds write-back for one flow in dry-run, where the integration produces exactly the payload it would have sent and a person reviews the diff. Phase three runs it in production on a narrow slice — one region, one team, one document type — with the old manual path still live, so you can compare outputs rather than trust them. Phase four widens scope and adds the remaining systems, hardening retries and rate-limit handling against real volumes. Phase five is the handover. Teams that skip straight to a broad production cutover almost always discover the permissions edge case and the schema drift at the same time, on real customer data, which is the one place you cannot afford to find them.

08 /

Frequently asked questions

09 / More services
10/Start the conversation

Start your deployment.

Talk directly to a principal engineer.

No sales team.

No discovery workshops.

No procurement circus.

We scope, build and ship.

  • Reply within one business day
  • Engineer-led assessment
  • Written proposal
  • Lisbon · UK time zone

No commitment. Just an engineer.

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