Binary Refinery
A Signature-tier build for Aotearoa's grounded AI advisory firm. Custom Astro front-end with two distinctive features no other NZ advisory site has — a chat agent trained on the business, and an interactive readiness assessment that does real qualification before a sales call.
Headline features
Custom AI agent + interactive readiness assessment
AI strategy & advisory, made tangible
Full disclosure: Binary Refinery is Pixelsmith’s sister company — both founded by Kat. The two businesses pair deliberately: hire either and you get web craft and AI / operational-technology expertise on the same project, without managing a handoff between two agencies.
Binary Refinery helps New Zealand leadership teams cut through AI hype and build practical, grounded strategy. The website needed to do the same — speak with authority, demonstrate the work, and make the offering tangible to buyers who’d been burned by AI vendors before.
The brief
Stand out in a market crowded with AI vendors making promises they can’t keep, and prove credibility to buyers who’ve been burned before. The site needed to embody the offering, not just describe it. If a visitor lands on an “AI advisory” website, the website itself should be a working argument that this firm knows what they’re doing.
The approach
Signature was the obvious tier. Binary Refinery sells thinking and strategy at the senior end of the market — the site needed to look and feel like a serious operator, not a templated consultancy. Astro for speed, a custom front-end so nothing about the page reads like a starter theme, and a design language calibrated to the consultancy’s premium positioning — celestial-coordinate eyebrows, deliberate volt accents against deep brand blues, motion timed to feel intentional rather than ornamental.
Two ideas drove the build past good-looking marketing:
- The site itself should do AI work, not describe it. If you sell AI advisory, your website should be running AI.
- The site should answer the buyer’s first question — “where do we even start?” — rather than dropping them into a contact form.
Those two principles led to the two distinctive features.
What I built
Ada — a custom AI chat agent. A fully custom chat experience trained on Binary Refinery’s data, methodology, services, and tone of voice. Visitors have real conversations about whether and how they should be thinking about AI, with Ada answering as Binary Refinery would in a meeting. Built over a prompt-engineered system on the OpenAI API, with conversation continuity so leads can pick a thread back up later.
Interactive AI Readiness Assessment. A tailored questionnaire across organisational, operational, and technical readiness dimensions. Responses pipe into an LLM that generates personalised, on-brand results — turning “are we ready for AI?” from an abstract worry into a concrete five-minute exercise visitors can do without booking a call.
The rest of the site. Custom design across every page: Home, About, three Services advisory areas, Workshops, Library (long-form content), Contact. Every section written to reinforce the grounded, independent, Aotearoa-based positioning. A booking flow that lands prospects directly into the right advisory-area conversation rather than a generic “let’s chat” inbox.
Tech: Astro 6 for the front-end, Cloudflare for hosting and edge delivery, custom serverless endpoints for the AI agent and assessment engine.
The outcome
The site shipped in two weeks of focused build. Day one of public launch: the AI agent and readiness assessment are both fully working, which means the website is doing real consultative work for visitors before any human gets involved. Early signals — visitors engaging with Ada before booking calls, arriving at discovery already partway through qualification — confirm what we set out to build.
What made this different
A consultancy site that’s a working demonstration of the consultancy’s craft. Most agencies talk about “your website should work harder for you.” Binary Refinery’s site is a working argument — and the cleanest example I’ve shipped of what Signature-tier actually means.
It’s also the clearest demonstration of how Pixelsmith and Binary Refinery work together for clients. The two businesses are deliberately complementary — Pixelsmith brings the design and build craft, Binary Refinery brings the AI strategy and operational-technology depth. Hiring either one means you can pull in the other for the parts of the project that need it, on the same engagement, without coordinating across separate agencies. Useful when a project sits at the intersection of brand and capability — and most of the ambitious ones do.
Scope
Strategy · Custom design · Bespoke Astro front-end · AI agent integration · Custom serverless API · Content & UX
A Signature-tier build, shipped in two weeks.