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FORMA

For technical teams

EVERY AGENT WE SHIP, TAKEN APART.

The same system, for the people who'll run it. The building blocks, where it deploys, and honest answers to the hard questions — no marketing gloss.

// 01 — ANATOMY

How it works

FIVE BUILDING BLOCKS.
EACH ONE DEBUGGABLE.

Real patterns we ship. Sourced, cited, debuggable.

01 · Memory

Your AI remembers.

Three layers: this conversation, this task, your team's history.

Without memory, every call starts from zero. Customer asks the same intake questions. Sales agent forgets the deal. Memory is what turns an AI assistant into a team member who's been here a year.

Real outcome

70% faster time-to-first-response on returning customers.

02 · Retrieval (RAG)

It doesn't guess — it finds.

Search your docs, find the right passages, answer with citations.

Pure ChatGPT invents plausible answers. RAG answers point to MSA v4, page 12, §8.2. The difference between a tool you can defend in court and one you can't.

Real outcome

A&O Shearman + Harvey: ~7 hours saved per contract review.

03 · Reasoning

It thinks in steps — like a careful junior.

Thought → Action → Observation → repeat. The trace is debuggable.

A non-reasoning agent fails opaquely. A reasoning agent shows you where it went wrong — wrong tool, wrong document, hallucinated step. That's how you ship in regulated industries.

Real outcome

Devin (AI coding agent) went 34% → 67% PR-merge in 18 months via reasoning + reflection.

04 · Tool Use

It doesn't just answer — it acts.

Calls Salesforce, posts to Slack, opens tickets, runs SQL — with audit log.

Without tools, an agent is a glorified search box. With tools, it closes the loop. We use MCP — Anthropic's open standard, 500+ servers, donated to Linux Foundation Dec 2025.

Real outcome

Confirmation gates on destructive ops. Audit log non-negotiable.

05 · Guardrails

What keeps it from going off the rails.

Prompt-injection defense + citation enforcement + PII + permissions.

By Q1 2026, US courts imposed $145K+ in sanctions for AI-hallucination filings. Sullivan & Cromwell, April 2026 — 40+ fabricated citations. Guardrails are what make legal, finance, healthcare actually ship.

Real outcome

Defense in depth. Honest framing: no single fix is bulletproof. We tell clients the truth.

// 02 — WHERE IT RUNS
On your server

YOUR DATA NEVER LEAVES YOUR PERIMETER.

FORMA deploys entirely on your infrastructure — on-prem or private cloud. Your servers, your audit trail, your control.

  • On-prem or private cloud

    Deploy on your infrastructure. Your servers, your rules.

  • Your data stays yours

    Full data sovereignty. Nothing leaves your perimeter.

  • RAG over private corpus

    Retrieval runs exclusively on your documents.

  • Audit trails by default

    Every query, every response — fully logged and traceable.

Your Infrastructure
RAG Engine
Agent Chain
Vector DB
Audit Log

Your Private Data

DocsCodeSlackEmailDB
// 03 — QUESTIONS
Engineering FAQ

THE HARD QUESTIONS,
ANSWERED STRAIGHT.

five real questions. If yours isn't here — ask it directly.

Probably yes — and we'll say so. Most problems don't need an autonomous agent. Per Anthropic's own guidance: 'most successful implementations use simple, composable patterns rather than complex frameworks.' We default to workflows (prompt chains, routing) and only justify a full agent loop when the steps are unknown until runtime. The discovery call exists to answer this honestly, before you commit any budget.