Straight answers.
What we do, what it costs, how long it takes, who owns what, and how we handle your data. If your question isn't here, ask us directly.
About working with us.
What does Evolve Mind Solutions do?
Evolve Mind Solutions is an Australian AI company based in Sydney. We do two things: we build our own AI products (Advisory Stack, Quolla, Kalvi and Evolve AI), and we run an AI consulting and custom-build practice that helps other businesses adopt AI — covering strategy, custom AI tools, cloud deployment and data security.
Where is Evolve Mind Solutions based?
Our office is at Level 1, 63-73 Ann Street, Surry Hills, Sydney NSW 2010. We are an Australian company and we work on-site or remotely, wherever the work is.
What AI services do you offer?
Six service tracks: AI Readiness & Strategy (an audit and ROI-ranked roadmap), AI Development (LLM, RAG and agent applications engineered end to end), Custom AI Tools & Architecture (bespoke solution and system design), Forward-Deployed Engineering (our engineers embedded inside your team), Cloud Build & Deployment (production deployment on AWS, Azure or GCP), and AI Products & Co-Build (build an AI product with us, on foundations we've already proven).
Can we hire an AI engineer or consultant from you directly?
Yes. As well as fixed-scope projects, you can engage our people directly — an AI subject-matter expert, an AI developer, an AI consultant, a data/MLOps engineer or a forward-deployed engineer — from one day a week up to a full embedded squad. We're based in Surry Hills, Sydney, work on site across greater Sydney, and work remotely with clients Australia-wide.
How much does an AI readiness assessment cost?
The first AI readiness assessment is free. It is a structured, fixed-scope engagement that maps where AI pays off in your business and gives you a ranked, costed roadmap.
How long does an AI project take?
We work in quarters, not years. We start with a small, high-impact use case that can be proven quickly, then scale on evidence — rather than running an 18-month transformation programme before you see any value.
Is the AI you build custom to us, and can we run it ourselves?
Yes. We build alongside your team and share what we know as we go, so you get the code, the architecture and the data — a custom solution fitted to your business, that your team can run and extend when we're done. No black box, no vendor lock-in.
How do you handle data security and privacy in AI?
We engineer for it from the start: encryption, least-privilege access, data residency, and clear boundaries on how your data is used — your information never becomes someone else's training set. We align to ISO 42001 and the National AI Centre's guidance, and we build the documentation and audit trails required by the Privacy Act automated-decision rules taking effect 10 December 2026.
Which AI models and cloud platforms do you work with?
We work with Claude and other large language models, RAG and embeddings, and agent frameworks — deployed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. On the data side we work with dbt, Airflow, Databricks, BigQuery, Supabase and PostgreSQL.
About engaging our people directly.
You can hire an AI subject-matter expert, developer, consultant or forward-deployed engineer from us — see hire an AI engineer.
Can I hire an AI developer or AI consultant in Sydney?
Yes. Evolve Mind Solutions is a Sydney-based Australian AI company and you can engage our people directly — an AI subject-matter expert, an AI developer, an AI consultant, a forward-deployed engineer, a data/MLOps engineer, a responsible-AI and governance lead, an AI reliability engineer, an AI security engineer, an applied AI/ML engineer, an AI product manager or an AI adoption and enablement lead. Engagements run from one day a week to a full embedded squad, on site across greater Sydney or remote anywhere in Australia.
What is a forward-deployed engineer (FDE)?
A forward-deployed engineer is an engineer who works inside your organisation rather than at arm's length — in your codebase, your standups and next to the people who have the problem. The model exists because the hardest part of an AI project is usually working out what to build, and that only becomes clear when an engineer is close enough to the work to see it. An FDE does the discovery and ships the fix, often in the same week.
What is an AI reliability engineer?
An AI reliability engineer is the SRE of an AI system: the person who makes a non-deterministic product behave predictably enough to depend on. They build the evaluation suites and regression tests that catch quality dropping between releases, monitor for hallucination and drift in production, hold the system to latency, cost and availability budgets, and own the fallbacks and incident runbook for when a model misbehaves. The role exists because a traditional uptime check cannot tell you an AI is up and confidently wrong. It is usually the first hire a company makes after its first AI feature goes live.
What does an AI security engineer or AI red teamer do?
An AI security engineer tests an AI system the way an attacker would, with your authorisation and against your own build: prompt injection, jailbreaks, attempts to make the system leak internal data, and abuse of any tools or actions an agent can reach. They then tighten the permission boundaries, scope the tools and limit the blast radius, working from the OWASP LLM Top 10 across the model, retrieval and tool layers. It is a different job from AI governance: governance asks whether a decision is defensible to a regulator, security asks whether the system can be made to misbehave in the first place. Any AI that can read internal data or take actions needs both.
What's the difference between an AI consultant, an AI engineer and an AI SME?
An AI consultant works out where AI pays off and builds the roadmap. An AI engineer (or AI developer) writes the software and puts it into production. An AI subject-matter expert is the senior technical authority — the person who sets the architecture, sizes the risk and says whether a plan will hold before you spend on it. Small organisations often need one person covering all three; larger ones split them. We'll tell you honestly which one you actually need.
Can we hire one engineer, or do we have to buy a whole project?
One person is a completely normal engagement. The most common starting shape is a single forward-deployed engineer two to three days a week for a quarter, or a fractional AI lead one day a week. You do not need a defined project to begin — working out what's worth building is part of what the engagement is for.
How quickly can you have someone working with us?
Usually within one to two weeks of agreeing scope, and we'll normally do a free readiness conversation first so the person arrives already understanding your systems. If it's urgent, say so — we'll tell you straight away whether we can staff it rather than stringing you along.
How is this different from hiring an AI contractor through a recruiter?
You are engaging a company that ships AI into production, not a résumé from a database. Our engineers arrive backed by the team behind them — architecture review, guardrail tooling, security practice and the ability to add specialists mid-engagement. There is no recruiter margin, no three-month notice period, and if the fit is wrong it is our problem to fix, not yours.
Do your engineers work on site in our office?
Yes, on site across greater Sydney, and hybrid or fully remote anywhere in Australia. For Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra engagements we travel for the parts that genuinely need to be in person — discovery workshops, go-live, handover — and work remotely in between, in your time zone.
What does it cost to hire an AI engineer or consultant in Australia?
We quote a day rate or a fixed monthly fee against an agreed shape — fractional lead, embedded engineer, or a small squad — after a free scoping conversation. It is deliberately smaller than a big-four consulting engagement and structured so you can stop at the end of any month. We won't quote a number before we understand the work, because a number without scope is meaningless.
Are your engineers based in Australia?
Yes. The engagement is run out of our Surry Hills office in Sydney, in Australian business hours, by an Australian-registered company (ABN 41 672 546 217). Your work is not handed to an offshore delivery centre overnight.
Can you help us hire and build our own internal AI team?
Yes, and we'd rather you did. We're not a recruiter, but knowledge transfer is built into every engagement — your team works alongside ours and keeps the code, the architecture and the reasoning. Where clients are standing up an internal AI function, we help scope the roles, sit in on technical interviews and mentor the people they hire.
About the things we've built.
Advisory Stack
What is Advisory Stack?
Advisory Stack is an Australian tax advisory and scenario-modelling platform built by Evolve Mind Solutions. It helps consumers, employers and tax agents forecast tax and model scenarios, with an AI assistant wrapped in a multi-layer guardrail pipeline. It is an advisory layer, not a lodgement tool.
Does Advisory Stack lodge tax returns with the ATO?
No. Advisory Stack does not submit returns to the ATO. It is the advisory and modelling layer that sits above the lodgement tools tax agents already use.
Which accounting systems does Advisory Stack connect to?
Advisory Stack connects to Xero, MyOB Business and QuickBooks Online.
Quolla
What is Quolla?
Quolla is an all-in-one payroll and accounting platform for Australian businesses, built by Evolve Mind Solutions. It covers accounting, invoicing, bills and expenses, and full payroll including Single Touch Payroll v2, PAYG withholding and Super Guarantee.
Is Quolla Single Touch Payroll (STP) compliant?
Yes. Quolla supports Single Touch Payroll Phase 2, including pay events, finalisation and year-to-date tracking.
Does Quolla handle GST and BAS?
Yes. Quolla produces GST and BAS reporting alongside P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and AR/AP ageing reports.
Kalvi
What is Kalvi?
Kalvi is an AI-powered K-12 learning platform built by Evolve Mind Solutions for Australian education. It aligns to the Australian Curriculum across all eight states and territories and uses a Learn → Practice → Test pedagogy.
Which exams does Kalvi prepare students for?
Kalvi offers progressive preparation for NAPLAN, NSW Selective, NSW OC, VIC Selective, QLD Scholarship, WA GATE, SA IGNITE and ACT Selective.
Evolve AI
What is Evolve AI?
Evolve AI is a dual-edition Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDE) delivery studio and AI coding assistant built by Evolve Mind Solutions. It is available as a Free Community Edition on the VS Code Marketplace (MIT licence), and as a Paid Enterprise Edition distributed as a standalone portable desktop executable (.exe). It provides live database introspection, automated dbt/PySpark model generation, typed TypeScript/Python client SDK scaffolding, and automated client handover runbooks.
Is Evolve AI free?
The VS Code extension on the Marketplace is completely free to use under the MIT licence as the Community Edition. It includes core AI chat across 9 providers, local models (Ollama, Gemma 4), and FDE delivery stages 1 through 4. For enterprise engineering teams needing zero-install standalone executables, automated Oracle/T-SQL transpilation, Row-Level Security generation, Reverse ETL workers, Multi-Cloud DevOps scaffolding (Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD), PII sanitization, SIEM audit logging, and hardware-bound Ed25519 offline licensing, we offer the paid Evolve AI Enterprise Edition (available as a standalone desktop app or corporate site license).
What is the difference between the Free Community Edition and Paid Enterprise Edition?
The Free Community Edition provides the core VS Code extension with AI chat across 9 providers, 18 workspace plugins, and FDE Stages 1–4 (DB Introspection, Schema Mapping, Client SDK, Runbook Docs). The Paid Enterprise Edition adds: (1) Zero-installation standalone portable desktop app (.exe) requiring no VS Code or admin rights; (2) Phase 5 Enterprise Suite with automated Oracle and T-SQL to Snowflake/BigQuery transpiler, automated Row-Level Security (RLS) generator, Reverse ETL sync workers, and synthetic data generator; (3) Phase 6 DevOps Hub with multi-cloud Terraform HCL, GPU Kubernetes manifests, Docker Compose, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps); (4) Enterprise compliance with PII sanitization, SIEM audit forwarding (Splunk, Datadog, Sentinel), and Great Expectations/Soda Core data quality drift gates; (5) Databricks Lakehouse Unity Catalog lineage and query cost analysis; and (6) 100% air-gapped Ed25519 hardware-bound cryptographic licensing with priority commercial SLA support.
Why should our company purchase the Standalone Desktop Edition?
Corporate data teams, banks, and consultancies choose the Standalone Desktop Edition because: (1) Zero IT friction: runs as a self-contained portable .exe without requiring administrator rights, VS Code installation, or third-party extensions; (2) Air-gapped compliance: 100% offline Ed25519 cryptographic licensing with zero telemetry and zero external phone-home calls, complying with strict banking data sovereignty; (3) Massive migration ROI: automated transpilation from legacy Oracle and SQL Server to modern Snowflake and BigQuery saves hundreds of engineering hours per project; (4) Complete delivery lifecycle: scaffolds everything from infrastructure (Terraform/Kubernetes) to security (RLS/PII masking) to client runbooks in minutes; and (5) Dedicated commercial support with priority SLAs and custom dialect templates.
Which AI providers does Evolve AI support?
Nine. In the cloud: Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, OpenAI and OpenAI-compatible services (including Groq, Mistral, Together AI and LM Studio), GLM from Z.ai, and the Hugging Face Inference API. Running locally on your own hardware: Ollama, Google's Gemma 4, GLM/CodeGeeX, and Colibri. Enterprise Edition additionally supports private, on-premise model serving endpoints (vLLM, Triton Inference Server, Hugging Face TGI).
Can Evolve AI run without sending my code anywhere?
Yes, and this is a foundational design principle. Run it against Ollama, Gemma 4, CodeGeeX or Colibri and your code never leaves your machine. There is also an air-gapped mode with a strict network blocker, and a Zero-AI Offline Suite — SQL formatter, dataset profiler, dbt test generator, Cron and Regex workbench, Terraform and Docker security linters — that involves no model at all. In Enterprise Desktop Edition, cryptographic licensing is validated entirely offline using Ed25519 signatures, ensuring 100% data sovereignty.
What is the Forward-Deployed Engineers Delivery Studio?
It is an end-to-end delivery framework for engineers deploying data and AI solutions inside client environments. Stages 1–4 (available in Free Community and Enterprise) cover live DB introspection, foreign schema mapping to dbt, typed client SDK generation, and client handoff documentation. Stages 5 & 6 (exclusive to Paid Enterprise) add automated SQL transpilation (Oracle/T-SQL to Snowflake/BigQuery), automated Row-Level Security, Reverse ETL sync workers, and multi-cloud DevOps scaffolding (Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD).
Which data and cloud platforms does Evolve AI understand?
Eighteen plugins activate automatically from the files in your workspace, with no configuration. For data: dbt, Apache Airflow, Databricks with Unity Catalog, Jupyter, PyTorch and a data analysis and reporting plugin that builds charts and HTML reports from CSV, Excel and Parquet. For cloud: AWS, Google Cloud and Azure plugins that connect to your real accounts to list resources, run queries, browse storage and diagnose failed jobs. For infrastructure and application code: Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Django, FastAPI, pytest, Git and a security scanner.
Does Evolve AI work in Cursor or VSCodium?
Yes. The Free Community Edition requires VS Code 1.85 or later and works in VS Code and its forks, including Cursor and VSCodium. If your organisation restricts IDE extensions or developer environments, the Paid Enterprise Standalone Desktop Edition runs completely independently as a portable Windows application.
Where can I download the standalone desktop application?
A zero-installation portable desktop executable (v2.20.0 for Windows x64) is available directly from our dedicated download page at /products/evolve-ai/download/. It runs directly without requiring admin rights and includes Ed25519 offline license validation, an integrated terminal, workspace explorer, and full air-gapped security.
How does enterprise commercial licensing work?
The Enterprise Edition uses Ed25519 asymmetric cryptographic signatures tied to machine hardware fingerprints or organization seats. Licenses can be generated and renewed 100% offline without network calls. You can request a quote directly through our contact page or via the in-app Procurement Request Generator in the desktop app.
Last updated: 12 September 2026
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Ask us directly. We'll give you a straight answer — including if we're not the right people for what you need.