AI strategy and opportunity design
Find where AI belongs in your firm, prove the case for it, and leave with a decision your leadership can fund.
A decision artifact: three candidate workstreams are scored for effort and value, one is chosen, and the opportunity map becomes a decision memo ready for sign-off.
What it is
Most firms do not have an AI problem. They have a queue of candidate ideas, no shared way to rank them, and a leadership team being asked to fund something nobody has costed. We start with the people who do the work rather than the people who wrote the proposal, and find out what actually constrains it.
What you get back is a decision. One opportunity map ranked by effort and value, one business case for the item at the top, and the evidence under both. If the honest answer is that fixing a process beats building anything, we write that down and say it to your face.
How it runs
Step 01. Decide
Interviews with the people closest to the work, then a walk through the systems they actually use. Each candidate gets scored on effort, value, and how much judgment it needs. The memo names one opportunity to fund first and states plainly what we are betting on, so the bet can be argued with.
- Current-state workflow map
- Opportunity map ranked by effort and value
- Decision memo
- Value hypothesis with its assumptions listed
Step 02. Build
A strategy that has never met the data is a guess. We build a narrow prototype against your own documents and systems so the business case gets tested before a budget commits to it. Occasionally that is where a plan quietly dies. Better here than in month six.
- Requirements for the chosen opportunity
- A narrow prototype running in your environment
- Acceptance criteria
- A build, buy, or stabilize recommendation
Step 03. Operate
We hand over the method, not only the answer. Your team keeps the scoring sheet, the interview guide, and the review cadence, so the next opportunity gets ranked the same way this one was. Every item on the roadmap carries a name. Nothing sits unassigned.
- A roadmap your team can run without us
- The scoring method, written down
- A named owner for each item
- Scheduled review points
Who this is for
Founders and CEOs
Every meeting brings another AI idea, and none of them arrive with a cost. One ranked list, one funded decision, and the reasoning attached to both.
Operations
You already know where the bottlenecks are; what you lack is the case that gets them fixed. The constraint is measured, priced, and put in front of the people who approve budgets.
Finance
You did not take a finance role to chase missing numbers across five systems. The reconciliation work gets scoped as a candidate build, with its assumptions on the page instead of in your head.
Example engagements
A process audit that led to an email-triage prototype.
A review of everyday work and existing software gave a law firm a prioritized plan and a working demonstration of AI-assisted email triage.
Read the case studyA statewide services directory, checked against its sources.
A statewide services directory checked against providers' own websites, with supported updates and a clear record of details needing follow-up.
Read the case studyQuestions
How is this different from an AI readiness assessment?
A readiness assessment usually scores your organization against a maturity model and hands back a grade. This engagement produces a decision instead: which workflow to fund, what it is worth, what it costs to build, and who owns it afterwards. Readiness questions get answered along the way, but they are not the deliverable.
How do you decide which opportunity comes first?
Three things, held together. How much effort the build takes. How much the current process costs your firm in time and error. How much judgment the work needs, because a step that requires judgment on every case is a poor first candidate. The scoring sheet is yours at the end, so you can rank the next batch yourselves.
What if the recommendation is not to build anything?
Then that is the recommendation, and it is written down with the reasoning. Plenty of expensive processes are broken by a missing field, an unclear owner, or a tool your firm already pays for and nobody configured. Finding that out early is a good outcome. It is cheaper than discovering it after a build.
Do we need in-house AI expertise to work with you?
No. We work with the operators who own the process — operations, finance, legal, HR — not only with IT. We handle the technical judgment and explain the tradeoffs in terms of your work rather than the model's. Your side of the table needs someone who can decide, not someone who can code.
Who from your firm actually does this work?
The engineers who sit in the interviews are the ones who write the prototype. There is no handoff from a strategy team to a delivery team, because that handoff is where the understanding leaks out and the estimates stop meaning anything. You meet the same people in week one and at sign-off.
The other capabilities
Agentic systems and automation
Agents that carry the routine steps of a workflow and stop for a named person at every judgment call, with the limits written down before anything gets built.
See the serviceKnowledge and document systems
Retrieval built on the documents your firm approved, with the source on every answer, an owner on every collection, and a schedule that keeps the library current.
See the serviceProduct and web engineering
Client portals, internal tools, dashboards, and public sites — scoped honestly, shipped in usable slices, and handed over with an owner and documentation that stands on its own.
See the serviceStart withthe businessproblem.
Thirty minutes. You describe what's slow, manual, or opaque today. We tell you honestly whether we're the right firm to fix it.
30 minutes