I Didn't Build an Onshore Team or an Offshore Team. I Built a Silicon Team.
Agencies still sell talent by location as a cloaked way of saying "same smart people but with different wages". The more useful question for clients is whether either option ad value at all.
There is an onshore team here, an offshore team there, and a blended rate somewhere in between. The slide is reassuring and the org chart is impressive. Whether the thinking is any good is left for later.
When I set up Tuna Studio, I wanted none of it. I built a micro consultancy instead, and behind it what I call a silicon team.
The case for small
There are two familiar models, and each has a flaw. The solo consultant is senior but thin, with only so many hours in a week. The full-service agency is broad but heavy: overheads, layers of account management, and the well-worn pattern in which senior people win the work and junior people deliver it.
A micro consultancy sits between the two, closer to an atelier than a factory. It is senior-led, low in overhead and quick to move, and the people you meet are the people who do the work. Every firm claims to be nimble, of course, so the real question is what makes it possible. My answer is the silicon team.
What a silicon team is, and what it is not
A silicon team is senior expertise, knowledge and opinion, with technology and AI doing the heavy lifting around it.
It is not the same as asking an AI to act as an expert. That shortcut is tempting, popular and wrong. Large language models learn from the vast average of what has already been written. Ask one to be an expert and you get an average expert, delivered with great confidence. Clients have been paying too much for that combination for years; they need not start paying for it from software.
The silicon team inverts the arrangement. Hard-won industry expertise, earned over years in regulated enterprise environments, sets the direction, makes the judgement calls and defines what good looks like. AI handles the volume: drafting, synthesis, variations, documentation. The thinking stays human, while the labour gets faster. It is the same principle as any good workshop: the tools have improved, but the hand on them still matters most.
That is how a small, senior team can deliver at a scale that once required a floor of people. AI does not replace the expertise; it multiplies it.
Questions worth asking any supplier
Who is doing the thinking? Not who is on the slide, but who will make the calls on your work.
Where does AI sit in the workflow? Supporting expert judgement, or standing in for it?
What does a human check before you see it? The answer tells you whose expertise you are actually buying.
The onshore-offshore debate is about where people sit. The question that matters now is whether the expertise is real. Geography is easy to sell. Judgement is harder to fake, although a good many are now trying. Small, well-run and properly expert remains a rather good way to do business.
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