Every ambition makes the plan. The order is what we engineer.
Most AI projects don't fail on technology — they fail on sequence: built on permissions nobody checked, ahead of promises already made to clients, faster than teams were trained. Our process finds ground truth first, then puts every one of your goals in the order that protects your business while it accelerates it.
Three things are almost always true when a company calls us about AI:
Ideas outnumber priorities. Ten use cases, no sequence, and pressure to start everywhere at once. Nothing on the list is wrong — it's just unordered.
Your core workflows have never been written down. The processes that actually make the business run live in a few people's heads and muscle memory — and you can't automate, or even prioritize, what nobody has captured. We surface them in discovery and map them properly in the roadmap's Assess phase.
Permissions predate AI. File access set up years ago becomes a real exposure the day an AI assistant can read everything an over-permissioned account can.
Three acts. About four weeks from intake to a dated plan.
Getting started is free. The assessment is a fixed fee for a defined scope, both of which you'll know before you commit. The build is scoped by the roadmap itself — never sold before it. Between the acts sit gates: checkpoints that must be true before the next thing starts. The gates are the process.
Tell us what's going on
5 minutesA short form before we book: what's driving this now, your biggest operational bottleneck, your top three hopes for AI. Nothing confidential — just enough for us to arrive prepared instead of generic.
The first conversation
45–60 minutesYou tell the whole story — every idea, every worry. We reflect it back organized, walk you through exactly how this process turns it into a plan, and show where each of your goals lands. We won't recommend tools or quote build prices on this call — any answer before the assessment would be a guess you'd deserve better than.
NDA signed and the assessment engaged at a fixed fee. Nothing confidential moves, and no diagnostic work starts, until both are in place. You know the full cost of the assessment before you say yes.
Intake & document review
Before the clock starts · ~30 min questionnaire, plus documentsA deeper questionnaire plus your existing documents — policies, any AI questionnaires you've answered for your own clients, a sample contract. Gathering those usually involves IT, whoever holds client contracts, and finance — allow about a week. Gaps and "unsure" answers are useful data, not failures. We read everything before we meet, and your three weeks start the day we have it.
Discovery session
Week 1 · 90 minutesOne structured working session, four passes: what's actually in use, what's already promised in contracts and questionnaires, everything you want, and what bounds the plan. This is also where the workflow at the core of your business gets named and described out loud — often for the first time anywhere. Full mapping comes later, in the roadmap's Assess phase. Every ambition is captured — none are filtered out.
Your Readiness Snapshot
Week 2Your posture scored across six dimensions, traffic-light style, with evidence behind every score — and each piece of evidence marked as something you told us, something we saw, or something that was tested. Plus the gap list: each place your documents and your day-to-day practice have drifted apart. This is usually the page that reorders the plan. You have until the roadmap session to flag anything we got factually wrong.
The roadmap session
Week 3 · 90 minutesTogether, we place every item from your wish list into a phased sequence — or give it a clear answer: deferred, superseded by something else on the list, or advised against, with the reason written down. You leave with the order — nothing dropped, everything placed.
Your plan, dated
Within 1 week of the roadmap sessionTwo artifacts: a short executive deck you can share internally, and the full proposal. The first phases are ready to sign — deliverable, owner, date, and price for each item — and later phases carry a target window and the decision point that firms them, so no date on the page is a guess. Plus a 30-day milestone you can hold us to.
The build is scoped separately, by the roadmap. You're never asked to commit to construction before the diagnostic is done — and the roadmap sometimes concludes you should configure what you already own, hand work to your own team, or not do something at all. When it does, that's what it says. The assessment is priced to stand on its own; it doesn't need to lead to a build to have been worth doing.
Foundation and first visible value, in parallel
First 30 days of deliveryProtection and standardization work begins — and alongside it, one visible quick win ships inside the first month. You never wait a quarter to see something real.
Custom builds, behind their gates
Per the roadmap datesAdvanced automation and custom AI work starts only after training is delivered, client-contract review is complete, and permissions are fixed for everything the build can reach — so nothing we build ever puts you on the wrong side of a promise you've made. The same release conditions apply whether we build it, you configure it, or your own team does.
Six dimensions. Evidence behind every score.
The snapshot scores your readiness to adopt AI safely — the foundation every roadmap item is built on. Green, yellow, or red; when we're torn between two, you get the tougher score with the reasoning written down. A green needs something we saw, not just something we were told — where we only have your word, the score says so and the next step is to check, not to fix. A generous score that later proves wrong costs you more than an honest one ever will.
Governance documents
Do current, consistent AI policies exist — and do they describe the business you actually run?
Training & adoption
Has your team been trained on the rules, or only signed them?
Identity & permissions
Can an AI assistant on any account reach only what that person should see?
Tool control
Is there admin visibility over the AI in use — including personal accounts doing company work?
Data handling
Retention, deletion, and confidential-data rules that match practice, not just policy.
Commitments & exposure
What you've already promised clients, partners, and regulators about AI — and whether it's true today.
D6 is where we earn our fee most often. If you serve regulated clients, you've likely already answered AI questionnaires for them. Making those answers verifiably true is usually the most urgent — and most valuable — item on the roadmap.
Five phases. Every goal gets a place — or an honest answer.
The roadmap session places each of your ambitions into a phase. Phases run in order — and two transitions are hard gates that we won't skip, for you or for us, because skipped gates are how AI projects create the liabilities they were supposed to prevent.
Protect
Permissions, approved tools, policy fixes, staff training
Standardize
Managed workspaces, account migrations, usage rules, spend controls
Quick win
One visible build, in parallel, with a named owner on your team — full rollout waits for training
Assess
Workflow mapping and a prioritized automation roadmap
Build
Custom agents and integrations — behind training, contract review, and fixed permissions
Want to move fast? Good — so do we. Speed comes from the quick win shipping in the first 30 days of delivery while the foundation work runs underneath it. The sequence is what makes the exciting work safe to ship.
Whatever phase an item sits in, and whoever builds it, the same conditions hold before it goes live: it runs in accounts you administer, permissions are fixed for whatever it can reach, the people using it have been trained on the rules, and anything that reaches your clients passes a disclosure check.
What you walk away with
- Readiness SnapshotSix evidenced scores and your gap list, in plain language
- Phased roadmapEvery ambition placed or answered, on one page — and where each idea came from
- Executive deck5–8 slides built to be shared with your leadership
- Dated proposalFirst phases ready to sign; later phases with target windows and the decision that firms them — with a 30-day milestone
What we hold ourselves to
Nothing is dropped; everything is ordered. Every idea you bring stays on the roadmap with a clear answer. Our job is never a reflexive "no" — it's "after this gate," or, occasionally, "here's why we'd advise against it."
We don't build what you already own. Each roadmap item gets an honest call: configure existing tools, hand to your internal team, or engage us to build. All three answers appear on real roadmaps — and where the work needs a specialist, the proposal states the requirements so you could hold anyone to them, not just us.
Evidence over optimism. Every score cites its source and says whether we saw it or were told it. If a finding of ours is ever contradicted later — in either direction — the process failed, and we treat it that way.
The questions everyone asks
What does this cost?
Two numbers, kept separate on purpose. The assessment is a fixed fee, quoted before you commit, for a scope written into the agreement — how many documents, contracts, and sessions it covers — so it stays fixed. The build budget comes out of the roadmap itself, priced from formal vendor quotes and scoped work — not estimates invented on a sales call.
We already bought AI tools. Is that a problem?
No — it's the normal starting point. The assessment inventories what you have (including the unofficial tools), and the roadmap's first instinct is to configure and govern what you own before adding anything.
Can we skip the assessment and just start building?
We can move fast — the quick win ships inside the first 30 days of delivery. But we've watched companies build on top of permission problems and client-contract conflicts, and unwinding that costs far more than three weeks of sequencing. The assessment is how fast stays safe.
Do you always end up recommending your own services?
No. Roadmap items get one of three calls: configure what you have, hand to your internal team with a spec, or engage us. If the honest answer is the first two, that's what the roadmap says. And the assessment is priced to stand on its own — it doesn't need to lead to a build to have earned its fee.
What if we disagree with a score?
Tell us before the roadmap session. If a fact we cited is wrong or out of date, show us and we'll correct it and re-score. If we agree on the facts but read the color differently, we'll walk you through the rule, the score stands, and your view is recorded next to ours in the proposal. You're paying for an honest read, not one you have to agree with.
Do you use AI on our documents?
Yes — and only in accounts we administer, with retention controls and training opt-out configured, never personal or free-tier accounts. How we store your materials, how long we keep them, and which tools touch them is written into the assessment agreement. We wouldn't pass our own data-handling score otherwise.
Start with five minutes, not a sales pitch.
Answer ten short questions — nothing confidential — and book your conversation. About four weeks after your intake comes back, you'll have a scored snapshot, a sequenced roadmap, and a plan with dates you can hold us to.
Start the 5-minute intake