The assessment
A four-week diagnostic, not a pitch deck.
Fixed fee. Fixed scope. Fixed timeline. You walk out with a board-readable view of where bounded agentic systems compound inside your operation, where they do not belong at all, and what the first three bets will cost and pay back.
Why this exists
Most enterprise AI programs fail in the diagnostic phase, not the build phase.
The buyer did not get the wrong vendor. The buyer got the wrong question. Strategy decks answer where agentic systems are theoretically interesting. They do not answer which of your own workflows can be bounded, which have practical review gates, and which carry a payback period your CFO will defend in a board meeting.
By the time that question gets asked, the pilot is already scoped, the governance posture is already fragile, and the roadmap is already committed. The cleanup cost is larger than the original engagement.
The assessment is the instrument that answers the question before the money is spent. It is the first and most consequential stage of our engagement motion, and we productize it so you can buy the diagnostic without buying the whole engagement.
What you walk out with
Five deliverables, written for the board.
01. Agentic readiness map.
Every workflow that crosses your CRM, finance, ticketing, project, clinical, or policy tooling, scored against three tests: is the boundary definable, is the review gate practical, is the payback defensible inside a board conversation.
02. Three-bet roadmap.
The first three workflows to agentify, ranked by payback period and risk posture. Sequenced so the second and third bets compound on the observability and review patterns the first one earns.
03. Architecture recommendation.
The bounded-environment design, determinism gates, audit trail standard, and vendor consolidation path. Written to pass through production change management and legal review without rework.
04. CFO-readable executive summary.
Capex versus opex profile, risk posture, payback model, and the explicit opportunities we are recommending against. Forwardable to audit, legal, and the board without translation.
05. Build and managed-operation quote for bet one.
A scoped, fixed-fee proposal for implementing the first bet on the roadmap, including rollout and twelve months of managed operation. You are free to take the roadmap to another firm. Most clients do not.
How the four weeks run
Week by week.
Week 01
Systems intake.
We inventory the systems you already run and the workflows that cross them. Stakeholder interviews with the CFO, COO, CAIO or AI program lead, and two to three department heads whose operations are in scope. Access to architecture diagrams, current vendor list, and any existing AI program documentation.
Week 02
Scoring and rejection.
We run each candidate workflow through the boundedness, review gate, and payback tests. Workflows that cannot be bounded come off the roadmap with written reasoning. The rejected list is often more valuable than the accepted list, because it removes options that would have consumed a year of budget.
Week 03
Architecture and sequencing.
We draft the bounded-environment architecture for the top three bets, the determinism gates each one requires, and the audit trail standard that will hold across all of them. Sequencing gets decided with your CFO and COO in the room, not after.
Week 04
Delivery and readout.
Written deliverables hand over. Ninety-minute readout with your executive team covering the full assessment, the three-bet roadmap, the architecture, the payback model, and the scoped quote for bet one. You own the documents. We are available for follow-up questions for thirty days.
Who it is for
Honest qualification, up front.
The assessment is built for CFOs, COOs, and Chief AI Officers at upper mid-market and enterprise companies, typically between two hundred fifty million and five billion in revenue, in healthcare, insurance, professional services, and financial services. If your board has asked what is actually shipping against your AI budget, you are the buyer we designed this for.
It is not built for early-stage companies, for organizations without existing systems of record to upgrade, or for buyers who want a general-agent deployment and a story to tell. If that is where you are, we will say so in the intake call and refer you to firms whose offer is better matched to your question.
Investment
Fixed fee. No scope creep.
The assessment is thirty-five thousand dollars, fixed fee, invoiced in two installments. It includes the four weeks of diagnostic work, all five deliverables, the ninety-minute executive readout, and thirty days of follow-up access to the assessment team.
If the engagement converts to implementation, the assessment fee is credited against the first phase of the build. In practice, the cost of running this diagnostic is lower than the cost of one quarter of a misbuilt pilot, which is the alternative most buyers are actually comparing it against.
Request assessment intake.
Tell us where your AI program sits today and what the board has been asking. We respond to every qualified request within three business days, either with a structured intake call or with a direct referral if the fit is not right.