Plan
Make the expensive decisions cheaply. Two to six weeks that produce a ranked opportunity assessment, a readiness diagnosis, a target architecture and a business case a CFO can approve — or a defensible reason not to proceed.
The cheapest phase is the one that stops a bad project
Most failed AI programs were fully funded before anyone established what would move, by how much, or whether the data existed to support it. Planning exists to answer those questions at a fraction of the cost of answering them mid-build.
A Plan engagement is deliberately short. If discovery is running for months, it usually means nobody has decided what success is — and that is a decision, not a research problem.
Plan is frequently bought on its own. A number of clients take the roadmap and execute internally, which is a perfectly good outcome.
What you can buy in this phase
AI Strategy & Roadmap
Ranked opportunity assessment across 5–10 candidate use cases, six-pillar readiness diagnosis, build-versus-buy analysis, and a sequenced 18-month plan with effort, ROI and risk modeled per initiative.
Explore → AlignmentExecutive AI Workshops
A facilitated session that gets a leadership team to a shared, realistic view of where AI pays in your business — and gets the buying committee aligned before money is committed.
Explore →What you leave the phase holding
Documents your champion can walk into a budget conversation with.
Opportunity register
Candidate use cases scored on value, feasibility, data readiness and adoption risk, with the reasoning shown.
Readiness diagnosis
Where data, platform, security, governance and skills will actually block deployment — and what closing each gap costs.
Target architecture
A modular, model-agnostic design that fits the systems you already run. See Technical Architecture.
Business case
A costed first increment with a named business metric and baseline, sequenced so early value funds later phases.
About planning engagements
How long does a Plan engagement take?
Typically two to six weeks depending on how many business units are in scope and how accessible your data and system owners are. It is fixed-price, so the scope and duration are agreed before it starts.
Can we take the roadmap and build it ourselves?
Yes, and some clients do. The deliverables are written to be executable by an internal team or a third party — not as a sales document that only works if we do the build.
What if the assessment concludes we should not proceed?
That is a successful Plan phase. Finding out in week four costs a fraction of finding out eighteen months into a build, and we would rather tell you than take the next engagement.
Who from our side needs to be involved?
A business sponsor who can name the outcome, the system owners for anything in scope, and someone from security or compliance if you operate under a regulatory framework. Involving security during Plan rather than at deployment is consistently the single biggest schedule saver.
Start with Plan
Short, fixed-price, and the cheapest way to find out whether the rest is worth doing.