RONIN & FORGE

From signal to system.

Enterprise AI, discovered, governed and deployed — for companies without a risk function.

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Who We Are

Ronin & Forge is an AI consulting practice for regulated and risk-sensitive businesses. We take AI work from discovery through governance into production, and we stay accountable for the system after it goes live.

Our clients need AI that holds up under audit, vendor review and a regulator’s question, and most of them have no in-house risk function to lean on. We bring the delivery discipline of enterprise financial services to companies that need it without the enterprise overhead.

  • We build multi-agent systems that take on high-volume operational work — intake and triage, client and internal communications, document handling, decision support. Each one is scoped against a metric agreed in discovery, instrumented so you can see what it is doing, and gated wherever a person needs to stay in the loop.

  • Most of what we build runs on the major cloud AI platforms, wired into the systems you already own — retrieval over your own content, agentic orchestration, API and workflow integration. Where data residency, cost predictability or contract terms require it, we design hybrid architectures that keep sensitive processing on infrastructure you control.

  • Twelve years of program delivery inside regulated financial institutions sits behind every engagement. We run compliance-heavy programs, evaluate and onboard vendors, and build roadmaps that survive contact with an audit — so your technology investments stay governed, scalable and defensible from day one.

How We Do It

Forged By Fire

Most AI projects do not fail on the model. They fail on everything around it — who approves an output, what happens when it is wrong, and whether anyone can explain the decision six months later to an auditor or a client.

That is the part we came up doing.

Ronin & Forge was built on twelve years of landing high-consequence technology change inside regulated financial institutions — program delivery for risk and analytics at a global credit rating agency, data product ownership at a national online brokerage, and the first enterprise big-data platform at a Fortune 100 retailer.

Three concurrent data center migrations with zero downtime. DORA, ESMA and Hong Kong EDSP regulatory programs under full audit traceability. A KYC replatform that took account onboarding from two days to under thirty seconds.

That work has one thing in common: the change had to land, and someone was always watching.

Ronin & Forge applies the same discipline to AI. Every engagement opens with signal analysis — where capability and regulation are genuinely moving, not where the noise is — and closes with a system running in production, governed, that we remain accountable for.

Our Founder

Zach Sazama founded Ronin & Forge after twelve years inside regulated financial services, most recently as Vice President of Program Delivery, Risk & Analytics. MBA in Business Analytics and BA in Software & Information Systems, UNC Charlotte. Based in Charlotte, NC.

How We Work

Discovery — signal analysis

We start by working out what is actually true right now. Where model capability, tooling and regulation are genuinely moving, and where the noise is. What comes out is a roadmap with named use cases, success metrics and a governance model, not a survey of the market.

Build — cloud AI enablement

Agentic orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, systems and API integration. Built for production from day one, against the metric agreed in discovery.

Govern — before it goes live

Access controls, approval thresholds, a human-gate map for the steps that need one, spend ceilings, and a review cadence. Sized for a company that does not have a risk function, because most do not.

Deploy — and stay accountable

The engagement ends with the system running, not with the recommendation. We are still on the hook when it breaks.

Most AI consulting stops one step into this. That is the step worth the least.