Building the Next Generation of AI-Augmented Consulting Delivery with Wire and Google Cloud
At Rittman Analytics, we’ve been exploring how AI can help us deliver better data and analytics projects for our clients, combining the experience of our consulting team with the speed and capabilities of AI coding agents. Our starting point has been Wire, our Claude Code plugin, which enables our consultants to use AI coding agents within a framework built around our established engineering best practices, project delivery methods and reusable blueprints.
The idea isn’t to replace experienced consultants with AI-generated code. It’s to give our team better tools, help them deliver more efficiently and free up more of their time for the architecture, complex problem-solving and client relationships where their expertise really matters.
Now we’re experimenting with taking this a step further.
What if we could supplement our human consulting teams with autonomous agents that have access to the same tools, project context and delivery methods? Agents that can pick up engineering tasks, work together on projects, write and test code and submit their work for review, all while following the same processes and quality standards as our consultants?
That’s what we’ve been building with Wire Hosted Agents, an experimental platform running on Google Cloud that enables teams of autonomous AI agents to work alongside our consultants, or independently on tasks where that’s appropriate.
For a boutique consultancy like ours, the potential is exciting. We could increase our delivery capacity without growing headcount at the same rate, run more engineering tasks in parallel and allow our experienced consultants to focus on the work that benefits most from their judgement and expertise.
Of course, making this useful for client delivery requires more than getting a collection of AI agents to generate code. They need to follow established engineering standards, work within a controlled environment, produce testable and reviewable changes and know when decisions need to be made by people.
We’re still at the experimental stage, using these agents on internal projects while we work through the practical challenges of reliability, governance and human oversight. But we’re already seeing what this new way of working could make possible.
And to give you an idea of what that looks like in practice, take a look at the Slack conversation below … where I’m the only human in those project conversations.
In this article, I’ll explain how Wire Hosted Agents work, how we’ve built the platform on Google Cloud and how we’re approaching the engineering standards, governance and human oversight needed to make autonomous agents a useful part of future consulting delivery.
What Are Wire Hosted Agents?
Wire Hosted Agents are automomous, AI-powered agents that Rittman Analytics runs as members of its own delivery teams, and are only being deployed on internal project work for now.
Each of these autonomous agents has its own Jira and Slack accounts and follows the same workflow, processes and steps that our human consulting team does: they read the engagement’s Wire record, propose a plan, write tickets according to best practices and ask when a decision is needed, then build the change with Wire’s commands and hand their work back as a pull request.
They differ from running Wire yourself in Claude Code in three ways:
- They are always on. Assigning a Jira ticket, or @mentioning an agent in a comment or in Slack, starts it. Nobody needs a terminal open.
- They work in teams. Agents are grouped into pods, and each member of a pod has a role: delivery manager, engagement lead, analytics engineer or data engineer.
- They work under a governance template. Each project’s template says, for every kind of decision, whether an agent may take it or a person must.
Hosted Securely on Google Cloud
The infrastructure used to host these autonomous agents runs on Google Cloud and provides a web-based admin console to create new agents, assign roles and personas and group them into pods for collaborative project work.
Each agent runs on its own Google Compute Engine machine so that they can have full access to a filesystem, terminal session, Claude Code and all of the tools including Wire that our regular consultants use on their projects.
Each agent’s VM is built from a shared and version-controlled container image stored in Artifact Registry, and deployed onto a platform with its own private network and outbound communications run through a Cloud NAT. Credentials used by each agent are stored separately in Secret Manager with IAM controlling what each agent can access
Agents and Humans working together in Jira and Slack
A fundamental goal with our hosted agents platform is that humans interact with agents in the same way they interact with human users, and agents communicate between themselves (and leave project records) using the same tools, agile project method and Wire Plugin package that our human consultants use.
Under the covers, assigning a Jira ticket or mentioning an agent in Slack then triggers a receiver on Cloud Run. It verifies that the event is genuine, and then then adds it to the agent’s Pub/Sub queue.
A supervisor on the agent’s virtual machine then picks up the ticket and starts Claude Code with the Wire plugin, using Anthropic’s Claude models.
Just as when you run the Wire in your own terminal session, the plugin then uses an orchestration session to plan the work and delegate tasks to specialist subagents that in-turn use tools such as git, dbt and BigQuery to do their work. Agents, when they need to ask questions do so using Jira comments, Slack threads and replies and open pull requests on GitHub.
A governance template defines when an agent needs a person to make a decision. Administrators can monitor and manage agents through a console on Cloud Run, with shared state stored in Firestore and logs in Cloud Logging.
An Example Fully-Agentic Project Delivery
Starting delivery of an internal project using our Wire Hosted Agents platform is simply a case of @ mentioning an engagement lead agent in Slack and passing-over a statement of work detailing what needs to be delivered, and the degree of involvement that I (as the client) need to have in-terms of signs-offs and approvals.
In this case I’ve chosen a lightly-governed model for this project’s delivery, and so soon after the engagement lead agent instructs the delivery lead agent to break the work down-into tickets, select the appropriate Wire release type and then create and assign tickets in Jira, reporting-back at the end through Slack so that I’m kept in-the-loop as things progress.
Agents then work on individual tickets that follow our Wire “release type” blueprints, asking supervisory agents to QA routine tasks and escalating more critical ones to human users, raise PRs and generally follow the software development lifecycle.
Right now this is an experimental feature that we’re still developing and figuring out how best to deploy on real client work, and will probably be something we end-up offering as a commercial service rather than bundling it into our free Claude Code plugin.
Watch this space though as our thinking in this area evolves, and drop me an email at mark.rittman@rittmananalytics.com if your organisation might be interested in helping us as a design partner.
Interested? Find Out More
Rittman Analytics is a boutique data analytics consultancy that helps ambitious, digital-native businesses scale up their approach to data, migrate to Looker from legacy BI tools and accelerate their analytics projects using Wire and our other AI technologies.
We’re authorised delivery partners for Google Cloud along with Oracle, Segment, Cube, Dagster, Preset, dbt Labs and Fivetran, and are experts at helping you design an analytics solution that’s right for your organisation’s needs, use cases and budget, and working with you and your data team to implement it.
If you’re looking for help with data and AI needs, or would just like to talk shop and share ideas on what’s going on in your organisation and the wider data analytics world, contact us now to organise a free, no-obligation call. We’d love to hear from you!