Aetherio
AI agency in Lyon

AI agency in Lyon: artificial intelligence inside your business tools

Agents, RAG assistants and automations connected to your data and software. Designed, put into production and maintained by a team based in Villeurbanne.

What an AI agency does

An AI agency designs and integrates artificial intelligence systems into a company's tools: assistants that answer from your documents, agents that act in your software, automations that process your workflows for you. The work does not stop at the prototype: it puts these systems into production, measures their quality and keeps their cost under control.

Aetherio is an AI agency based in Villeurbanne, in the Lyon metropolitan area. We work with SMEs, mid-sized companies and startups across Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and France, starting with an on-site workshop and following up remotely.

Why does AI remain just a buzzword for most companies?

The 'Gadget' Effect

Impressive POCs that are unusable in production. AI remains a demo toy instead of a business tool.

Data Silos

Your data is scattered across 10 different tools. Without connection, AI can't do anything with it.

Exploding Costs

Poorly optimized API calls that turn your OpenAI bill into a financial black hole.

Fear of Hallucinations

A chatbot that invents information or gives inconsistent answers destroys customer trust.

Concrete AI solutions, not promises

Custom integration into your existing applications and processes

01

Chatbots & Intelligent Assistants

Conversational assistants that truly understand your business context. 24/7 customer support, lead qualification, user onboarding.

  • RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) on your data
  • Configurable personality and brand tone
  • Smart escalation to humans
  • Multi-channel: web, WhatsApp, Slack
02

Intelligent Automation

Automate repetitive tasks with AI workflows. Document processing, classification, information extraction, report generation.

  • n8n, Make, Zapier integration
  • Document processing (OCR + AI)
  • Automatic email/ticket classification
  • Summary and report generation
03

Analysis & Prediction

Leverage your data to anticipate. Customer scoring, churn prediction, anomaly detection, personalized recommendations.

  • Custom predictive models
  • Real-time dashboards
  • Automatic alerts
  • Existing BI integration
04

Content Generation

Create content at scale without sacrificing quality. Product descriptions, personalized emails, technical documentation.

  • Custom business templates
  • Consistent brand voice
  • Human validation in workflow
  • Native multi-language

AI projects delivered

Systems in production, not demos

E-commerce

Automated SEO analysis and article publishing

An automation chain that analyses the site's SEO data, picks the topics to cover, writes the articles and publishes them with no manual work.

  • Automated SEO analysis
  • Continuous writing and publishing
  • No internal resources required

100,000+ impressions and 7,000+ clicks in 6 months, on keywords the site could previously only reach through paid ads.

« Communication was always smooth and deadlines were met, which is rare and much appreciated. »
Chihab A., E-commerce CEO (translated from French)
See the SEO Autopilot offer
SaaS startup

AI-powered automated prospecting SaaS

A complete multi-tenant SaaS in production, built for a startup with a large user base. The whole prospecting chain runs on AI, from finding targets to handling replies.

  • Target profile search and qualification
  • LinkedIn message and email generation
  • Intent analysis and reply classification
  • Model call cost optimisation
Accounting firms

MCP integrations with SaaS software

MCP (Model Context Protocol) connectors that let an AI assistant query the SaaS tools used by accounting firms directly, instead of moving data around by hand.

  • MCP connectors on business SaaS
  • Permissions defined action by action
  • Data read at the source
Fintech

AI market and contract analysis

For a fintech startup, AI processing that analyses market data and contracts to extract the information that matters for decisions.

  • Market data analysis
  • Contract reading and extraction
  • Results traceable back to the source

AI development company in Lyon and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region

We are a development agency based in Villeurbanne, in the Lyon metropolitan area. We work with companies across the region and well beyond.

Why proximity matters on an AI project

A successful artificial intelligence project requires understanding your business in depth: your documents, your vocabulary, the edge cases nobody thinks to mention. That understanding builds far faster over a day on site than over video calls.

We start most engagements with a workshop at your offices, with the teams who will use the tool daily. For our clients in Lyon, Villeurbanne, Grenoble, Valence or Saint-Étienne, that is easy to arrange. The work then continues remotely with weekly check-ins.

An industrial base that suits custom work

The region concentrates manufacturing, healthcare, chemicals, construction and a dense tech startup ecosystem. These are sectors where data exists, often in volume, but stays locked inside older systems that generic tools cannot read.

That is exactly the ground for custom AI development: connecting a model to a business ERP, extracting information from technical documents, making production data talk. We work on these problems for small and mid-sized companies as well as product teams.

A team, not a brokerage platform

You talk to the people writing the code. No layer of project managers between you and the engineers, no undisclosed offshore subcontracting. You own the source code, documentation ships with it, and you can take the project in house or hand it to someone else whenever you want.

We also work alongside internal teams, to frame an AI architecture, bring your developers up to speed or pick up a project that stalled.

Our approach: pragmatic AI

No buzzwords, measurable results

1

Audit & Scoping

Together we identify high-ROI use cases. No need to revolutionize the entire company: we start with quick wins.

  • Existing process mapping
  • Bottleneck identification
  • Data quality assessment
  • Prioritization by business impact
2

Rapid POC (2-4 weeks)

A functional prototype on your real data. You test AI in real conditions before investing more.

  • Prototype on real data
  • Defined performance metrics
  • Integrated user feedback
  • Objective Go/No-Go
3

Production & Scale

Robust deployment with monitoring, cost management, and continuous improvement based on field feedback.

  • Production-ready architecture
  • Cost & performance monitoring
  • Fallbacks and error handling
  • Continuous improvement

How much does an AI project cost?

Indicative ranges. The exact budget is set after the initial audit, before any commitment.

Integration and training sprint

From €4,000

2 to 4 weeks

Take what your teams have started with AI, make it reliable, put it into production and train the people who use it.

See the AI integration and training offer

POC on your data

From €5,000

2 to 4 weeks

A working assistant or agent prototype running on your real data, with success criteria defined upfront and a go or no-go decision at the end.

Production integration

€10,000 to €30,000

6 to 10 weeks

RAG, agents and automations integrated into your applications, with per-request cost monitoring, evaluation sets and a handover your team can take over.

Custom AI development: what it actually covers

Wiring a model into an application takes an afternoon. What takes time is everything around that model, and that is what decides whether it survives production.

Calling an API is not building an AI product

A call to GPT-5 or Claude Opus fits in fifteen lines of code. An AI feature running in front of your customers is a different matter: you have to decide what data the model is allowed to see, how you present it, what happens when it gets things wrong, how much you accept to pay per request, and how you will know quality is degrading before your users notice.

That layer is what custom AI development means. The model is an interchangeable component, replaced every six months by something better and cheaper. The architecture around it is what you keep.

Custom or off the shelf: the real question

Plenty of needs are served perfectly well by an existing tool. If you want a generic writing assistant or meeting transcription, paying a subscription is the right call, and we will tell you so.

Custom becomes relevant when the need touches your own data, your business rules or your internal systems. An assistant that has to query your ERP, apply your pricing grid and respect your contract terms will never come out of a subscription. That is where we work: on what cannot be bought off the shelf because it only exists at your company.

RAG, the piece that grounds the model in your data

Most of our projects rely on RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation. The principle: instead of hoping the model knows your company, you fetch the right excerpts from your documents and hand them over at answer time.

In practice that means chunking your content sensibly, indexing it in a vector store such as pgvector or Qdrant, and building retrieval that surfaces the right passages rather than the most superficially similar ones. The quality of an AI assistant is decided 80 % at that retrieval step, not by the choice of model. It is also what cuts hallucinations dramatically: the model quotes your documents instead of inventing.

What separates a proof of concept from production

A prototype impresses in a demo because you ask it the questions it handles well. Production is the opposite: real users ask unpredictable questions at an unpredictable rate, and the system has to hold.

Getting past that point takes unglamorous but essential work: an evaluation set built on real cases to measure quality on every prompt change, quota and rate limit handling so cost and latency stay under control, defined behaviour when the model is unavailable, and traces that let you understand afterwards why an answer was poor. We version prompts like code, with tests in continuous integration.

Concrete use cases

Use cases we set up regularly, adapted to your business

E-commerce

Personalized shopping assistant

An assistant that knows your catalogue, answers product questions and points customers to the right item, based on your real product sheets and stock.

B2B Services

Automatic lead qualification

AI reads incoming requests, extracts the need, budget and urgency, then routes them to the right person with a ready-to-use summary.

Legal / Accounting

Document analysis

Key information extracted from contracts, invoices and supporting documents, always linked back to the source passage so human review stays fast.

Customer Support

Augmented support agent

AI drafts answers from your knowledge base, handles simple requests on its own and hands the rest to a human with the context already gathered.

Technologies & Integrations

The best tools, adapted to your context

Language models

  • GPT-5 (OpenAI)
  • Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5
  • Mistral Medium 3.5
  • Self-hosted open weight models

Frameworks & SDKs

  • Vercel AI SDK
  • LangChain
  • LlamaIndex
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Automation

  • n8n
  • Make
  • Zapier
  • Custom workflows

Vector search

  • PostgreSQL pgvector
  • Qdrant
  • Pinecone
  • Weaviate

Why choose us for your AI project?

Integration, not gadgets

We don't sell AI for AI's sake. Every solution integrates into your existing tools (CRM, ERP, business apps) and generates measurable ROI.

Cost control

Prompt optimization, intelligent caching, choosing the right model for each task. Your API bill stays under control.

Reliability & Security

Architectures with fallbacks, output validation, GDPR compliance. AI never becomes a critical failure point.

Custom AI agents: when the assistant starts acting

A chatbot answers. An agent acts. That shift completely changes the architecture and security questions you need to ask.

From a chatbot that informs to an agent that executes

A classic assistant reads your documents and phrases an answer. An AI agent also holds tools: it can query a database, open a ticket, send a quote, update a customer record, trigger a workflow. It chains several steps toward an outcome and decides the route itself.

That is what makes agents useful, and also what makes them delicate. An assistant that gets it wrong gives a bad answer. An agent that gets it wrong writes into your systems.

Permissions, not trust

We treat every tool exposed to an agent as a public API. Each action has an explicit scope, validated parameters and a trace. Reversible operations can run autonomously; anything that commits the company, a customer email or an accounting entry, goes through human validation.

The MCP protocol standardised how tools are plugged into a model, which simplifies integration considerably. It says nothing about what the agent is allowed to do: that remains an architecture decision, made with you, one business process at a time.

Evaluating a non-deterministic system

An agent does not return exactly the same answer twice. Classic tests, which compare an expected output to an actual one, stop working.

We build evaluation sets specific to your business: a collection of real cases, explicit success criteria, and automated scoring that runs on every change. That is what lets you swap models or adjust a prompt without flying blind, and answer the concrete question: is this better than before?

They trusted us

Founders and business owners who had a project, a need, a deadline. Here's what they have to say.

"Disponibilité, réactivité et implication. Valentin est professionnel et pédagogue."

A

Alban B.

CEO Belho Xper

"Il allie une expertise technique pointue à une solide vision business."

C

Charley A.

Co-fondateur Avnear

"Nous avons travaillé ensemble sur la conception d'une automatisation IA pour un E-commerce. Le suivi a été régulier, clair et efficace. Les délais respectés et le résultat impressionnant."

C

Chihab A.

CEO E-commerce

"Valentin a su être à l'écoute de mes besoins et les retranscrires dans une application de gestion de clientèle. Les résultats ont été plus que satisfaisants et de haute qualité."

S

Sandrine V.

Gérante Sandrin's Nail

"Une entreprise qui sait s'adapter parfaitement au besoin client."

S

Stanislas M.

Commercial

"Le site est clair, rapide, et nous permet de mettre en avant nos services de manière professionnelle. Nette augmentation des demandes."

C

Christophe R.

PDG Ravi Groupe

Frequently asked questions about our AI projects

No! Modern LLMs (GPT-5, Claude) are pre-trained on huge corpora. For a chatbot or content generation, your business data (documentation, FAQ, processes) is enough. For prediction, you need more historical data, but we assess that together during the audit.

An integration and training sprint starts at €4,000. A POC of an assistant or agent on your data starts at €5,000. A full integration with RAG, agents and automations ranges from €10,000 to €30,000 depending on how many systems are connected and how much human validation is required. Model usage costs come on top, and we estimate them before going live. The exact budget is set after the initial audit.

We train teams directly on their own tools and use cases, on site in Lyon and the region or remotely. Training is part of our AI integration and training offer: we put a first use case into production, then teach your teams to use, maintain and extend it.

This is a real issue! We use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to anchor responses in your real data. Add to that well-designed prompts, automatic validation, and safeguards for sensitive cases.

Absolutely. We can use models with data processing agreements (OpenAI, Azure), open source models hosted on your premises, or European solutions like Mistral. Your data is never used to train third-party models.

A functional POC in 2-4 weeks. A production-ready solution in 6-10 weeks. We favor short iterations: you see results quickly and we adjust continuously.

Yes, that's our specialty! REST API, webhooks, SDK: we adapt to your technical stack. Nuxt, React, Laravel, Django... we interface with everything.

A chatbot answers from what it knows or from what you give it to read. An agent holds tools and can act: query a database, open a ticket, send a document, trigger a workflow. The difference is not cosmetic, it changes the architecture. An agent that writes into your systems needs explicit per-action permissions, human validation on committing operations, and full traceability.

Yes, and it is an architecture decision we make during framing. Three options: a European model such as Mistral, a US provider with a data processing agreement and European hosting, or a self-hosted open weight model on your infrastructure. The last option costs more to run but guarantees nothing leaves your premises. We help you weigh this against your sector and the real sensitivity of the data involved.

Through four levers, applied from the design stage. Pick the right model per task rather than the most powerful everywhere, since simple classification does not need a reasoning model. Cache what repeats. Limit the context size you send, which is the single largest cost driver. Set per-user quotas and overage alerts. We instrument cost per request from day one of production, so you see it before the invoice.

By measuring it, against criteria defined before you start. We build an evaluation set from real cases in your business, with explicit success criteria and automated scoring that runs on every change. That makes it possible to compare two prompt versions or two models objectively. In production we track escalation rate to a human, flagged answers and latency.

Regularly. We start with a technical audit of what was built: retrieval quality, prompt structure, error handling, real cost per request. Sometimes the conclusion is that part of it is salvageable and the surrounding architecture needs rebuilding, sometimes that starting fresh is faster. We tell you plainly which of the two, with numbers.

An AI project in Lyon or Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes?

Book a 30-minute discovery call (free). Together we identify high-potential use cases for your business, and you leave with a clear roadmap.

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