Deliverable 01
A prioritised opportunity portfolio.
Candidate use cases sized by cost, effort, and risk — each with a one-page "what would this look like built" write-up so nobody argues over ghosts.
S6 · Advise
Strategic AI Consultancy
Leadership-level direction — opportunity portfolio, operating model, board-ready narrative — grounded in what's actually buildable today.
Most AI strategy work misses because it optimises for a slide, not for a programme that runs. We work the other way round: what does the operating model have to look like for this to be a good business two years from now, and what’s the shortest sequence of buildable moves that gets you there.
We come at this as engineers who’ve shipped the systems the strategy is supposedly about. We won’t recommend a pattern we couldn’t build ourselves; we won’t sequence a portfolio we couldn’t staff. If the honest answer is “the AI part of this is not the interesting part yet”, we’ll say that.
When to bring us in
Signals we're the right fit.
- You've been asked for an "AI strategy" and don't want to hand back a slide deck of things you can't ship.
- The board wants a number and the engineering leads want a scope; nobody has both.
- Every function has an AI pilot and none of them talk to each other.
- You're deciding between building capability in-house, acquiring it, or leasing it — and the trade-off isn't clear.
- You know the technology is real; you're less sure the operating model around it is.
How we approach it
The moves that repeat.
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Understand what "good" would look like in your P&L.
We start with the two or three business outcomes the strategy is supposed to move. Cost line, revenue line, capability line. Everything downstream ladders to that.
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Survey the opportunity space with a practitioner filter.
We produce a portfolio of candidate use cases — but every entry is scored by whether a working system could be built inside a realistic quarter, not by how good the deck slide looks.
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Sequence for compounding, not for optics.
The first three engagements have to build capability the next three will need. We name the platform decisions and the data investments that make Year Two cheaper.
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Design the operating model.
Governance, funding, ownership, capability sourcing, vendor relations, risk. Not organograms — a written description of how decisions actually get made.
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Write the narrative.
A short document leadership can point at, a one-slide summary the board will remember, and a briefing pack for the next round of stakeholder questions.
What you get
Deliverables, in plain English.
Deliverable 02
An operating model.
Written description of governance, funding, ownership, sourcing, and risk. Includes the decisions you should be making at Q3 and the ones you shouldn't be re-making at Q4.
Deliverable 03
A board-ready narrative.
Short document plus one-slide summary. Practitioner-tested language, no hype. The version you can read to a room without cringing.
Engagement models
Shapes the work comes in.
SPRINT
AI Opportunity Sprint.
Four to six weeks. Portfolio, operating model, board narrative. Weekly working session with the sponsor. Delivered as a document, not a deck.
ADVISORY
Standing advisory.
Small monthly retainer for the next twelve months. We stay close to the decisions between the big moments. Named advisor, calendar transparency.
Related services
Often composed with this one.
S2 · Build
Agentic Systems Engineering
Multi-step LLM workflows with clean topology, tool surfaces, memory, evaluation, and safety — built to land in production, not stall in a demo.
S5 · Advise
Technical & Solutions Architecture
A senior architect embedded with your programme — end-to-end design, build-vs-buy calls, vendor evaluation, technical risk review.
S7 · Sustain
AI Enablement & Training
From AI-curious to AI-capable — briefings, bootcamps, and cohort programmes with measurable uplift.
Ready to talk about a strategic ai consultancy engagement?
A 30-minute discovery call. We'll get to the shape of the work and whether we're the right fit.