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info@darkforgeai.com Orange County, California Monday to Friday, 9 to 6 Pacific
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HomeServicesAI automation, Orange County

AI automation agency in Orange County, California.

DarkForge AI builds custom AI agents and automations for businesses in Anaheim, Irvine, Newport Beach, Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Huntington Beach, Long Beach and the rest of Southern California. Fixed scope, fixed price, a committed ship date, and a system you own outright.

What we automate

The work your team repeats every week.

Most Orange County businesses that call us are not looking for a chatbot. They have a queue: support tickets, quote requests, intake forms, catalog updates, lead lists, reports. We build agents that clear the queue and hand the exceptions to a person.

  • Customer support agentsOrder status, refunds, exchanges and routing through Stripe and Shopify, with every action logged. One D2C client resolves 68% of tickets without a person.
  • Lead qualification and enrichmentScoring, deduplication and research on inbound and outbound leads before a salesperson touches them. Our own stack has processed 12,000+ leads at a 94% dedupe rate.
  • Internal knowledge assistantsAnswers grounded in your policies, contracts and documents, with citations, so staff stop asking the one person who knows.
  • Document and catalog workflowsIntake forms, invoices, product data and images processed automatically. A Python image pipeline we built runs 500 times faster than the manual process it replaced.
  • Reporting and operationsScheduled reports, reconciliation, alerts and the recurring tasks that quietly consume a team's Friday.

Why Orange County businesses choose a local studio.

AI automation is easy to demo and hard to run. The difference shows up in month three, when the agent meets an edge case, a vendor changes an API, or someone asks for the logs.

In person when it helps

We are based in Anaheim and meet clients across Orange County and Los Angeles for scoping and handover. Everything else runs in a shared Slack channel, in Pacific time.

Fixed price, written proposal

A scoping session, then a proposal within 48 hours with price, milestones and a ship date. No hourly meter and no retainer required to get support.

Built for production

Evaluation suites before launch, monitoring after, rate limits, cost controls and a handoff to a person when confidence drops. A support agent we run has held 99.97% uptime.

You own everything

Code in your repository, keys and infrastructure in your accounts, data in your database. If you ever leave, you leave with the system.

Compliance in the plan

Wellness, telehealth and other regulated operators get disclosures, data handling and access controls designed in, with counsel reviewing before launch.

The whole system

An agent needs a data layer, a website, a deliverable inbox and secure infrastructure. We scope all of it under one accountable lead, so you never coordinate five vendors.

What an engagement looks like.

A typical automation build runs two to six weeks. A focused agent can be live in under ten days.

01

Discovery

A 45-minute session on the workflow, the data it touches and the metric that decides success. Fixed-price proposal within 48 hours.

Days 1 to 3
02

Prototype

The agent answering real cases from your data inside a week, with an evaluation set you agree to before we tune anything.

Days 4 to 10
03

Delivery

Production hardening: logging, monitoring, rate limits, tests and documentation, deployed into your accounts.

Days 11 to 18
04

Transfer

Recorded walkthrough, runbooks and 14 to 30 days of post-launch support. Then you run it, with or without us.

Days 18 to 21 and after
The full process Estimate what your manual work costs

Proof from production.

Numbers from live systems, not projections.

A monitor in the studio showing a dark chat interfaceAI systems · Customer operations

AI Support Agent

2026

Claude-powered support agent for D2C brands with Stripe and Shopify tool calls and a structured handoff to a person.

68%Auto-resolved
1.4 sAvg response
99.97%Uptime
The DarkForge workshop with the neon sign on the wallPlatform · Internal automation

The Forge

2024 to 2026

Our own delivery platform: lead enrichment, product image pipelines, deliverability auditing and compliance generation. Built to remove the repeated parts of every project.

500×Image pipeline
12k+Leads enriched
<60 sDeploys

Questions Orange County businesses ask.

How much does AI automation cost?
Every engagement is a fixed price for a fixed scope, quoted in writing within 48 hours of the scoping session. A focused agent or automation is a smaller engagement than a multi-agent platform, and the proposal shows the payback math for your case. Use the ROI calculator for a first estimate of what the manual work costs today. We do not bill hourly.
Which AI models do you use?
Claude, OpenAI and open models, chosen per task, with retrieval on pgvector or Pinecone. Model choice is an implementation detail; the evaluation set and the handoff rules are what make an agent safe to run.
Will the agent make things up?
Every agent we ship answers from your own data, logs every action, and hands off to a person when its confidence drops below a threshold you agree to. We build an evaluation set before launch and monitor accuracy after.
Do you work with businesses outside Orange County?
Yes. We meet Southern California clients in person and work with the rest of the United States remotely, in Pacific time, with a shared Slack channel for every engagement.
Who owns the agent after launch?
You do. Code in your repository, API keys and infrastructure in your accounts, data in your database. Runbooks at handover, no exit fees.

Start a project

Get a fixed-price proposal in 48 hours.

Send a brief or book a scoping session. We reply within one business day, and the proposal that follows commits to a price and a ship date.

Send a brief See the work