Flat-fee, six-week strategy engagements that produce a roadmap your board can read, your CFO can budget, and your team can execute against. Sometimes the deliverable is a recommendation not to build anything yet. We say it when we find it.
The phrase “AI strategy” has been diluted to the point where it could mean a one-slide narrative or a twelve-month transformation program. We use it for something specific: a structured, time-boxed engagement that ends with a written plan for what your organization should build with AI, what it should buy, what it should not do, and in what order — with the costs, risks, governance gaps, and data readiness questions surfaced before a dollar is spent on implementation.
The deliverable is a phased roadmap with one-month, three-month, and twelve-month horizons. Each phase carries a business case, a budget, a risk note, and a clear answer to “why this, why now, why not later.” The roadmap is paired with a build / buy / partner recommendation per workflow, a data readiness review, and an executive briefing deck designed for your board.
The right time to engage AI strategy consulting is before you’ve committed to a vendor, before you’ve sized the team, and before you’ve told the board what you’re going to do. We see two common timing mistakes. The first is engaging too late — after a vendor has been picked, after a budget has been approved, after the strategy work would have meaningfully changed the direction. The second is engaging too early — before there’s a real business problem AI could address, when the right engagement is a half-day workshop and not a six-week project.
If you’re between those two failure modes, you probably want to talk to us. If you’re at one of them, we’ll tell you in the first conversation. The first conversation is free.
Our standard strategy engagement is six weeks, flat fee, paid in thirds at kickoff, midpoint, and handoff. The work is led by a senior practitioner from start to finish. Your team is in every working session as a co-investigator, not a stakeholder being briefed.
The engagement is structured in four passes. Week one is intake: we interview the people who own the workflows AI might touch, we read the existing documentation, and we map the data landscape as it currently exists. Weeks two and three are option generation: we identify the high-value, plausible-to-build AI applications for your context, and we put each through a structured scoring against business impact, technical feasibility, data readiness, and governance risk. Weeks four and five are option ranking: the long list narrows to a phased roadmap, with the rationale visible and the trade-offs explicit. Week six is delivery: we walk the roadmap with your senior team and your board, and we hand off the artifacts.
About a third of our strategy engagements end here, without an implementation contract. That happens for two reasons. First, the strategy work sometimes finds a cheaper path: an off-the-shelf vendor, a manual workflow that doesn’t justify automation yet, an upstream data problem that has to be fixed before any AI work makes sense. Second, the strategy work sometimes surfaces that the organization needs a leader before it needs a project — in which case the right next step is our sister firm Talent Echo Advisory Group, who runs the retained executive search for Chief AI Officers and AI Governance leaders, and the role definition we produced flows directly into their brief.
If you can answer the following questions with confidence, you probably don’t need a strategy engagement and you should jump to implementation: what specific business outcome are you trying to move; what data will support that outcome; what is the build / buy decision and why; what governance and risk processes apply; how will success be measured; and what does the operational owner look like after handoff. If you cannot answer those questions cleanly, the strategy engagement is what gets you there — and trying to skip to implementation typically costs more, takes longer, and produces a worse outcome.
Flat-fee engagements, scoped to your specific situation. Paid in thirds: at kickoff, at the midpoint milestone, at handoff. The same model our sister firm Talent Echo uses for executive search, for the same reason — it aligns our incentive with delivering, not with billing.
We share the specific engagement price in the first conversation. We do not charge hourly. The fee does not inflate during the engagement.
Six weeks for a typical scoped engagement. Faster is possible for narrower questions; slower is rare and usually signals that what you actually need is an implementation engagement, not a strategy one.
A phased roadmap with one-, three-, and twelve-month horizons; build / buy / partner recommendations per workflow; total cost of ownership and ROI analysis; data readiness and governance gap assessment; a risk register with regulatory mapping; and an executive briefing deck for your board and senior leadership.
No. Many of our strategy engagements happen before a Chief AI Officer or Head of AI Governance has been hired. The role definition that comes out of the strategy work often informs the executive search itself. Our sister firm Talent Echo Advisory Group runs the retained search when that’s the next step.
Then we say so, and the strategy engagement ends with a recommendation not to proceed. We’d rather lose the implementation contract than sell you the wrong one. Roughly a third of our strategy engagements end this way — with a recommendation to buy off-the-shelf, fix an upstream problem first, or wait until the regulatory or technology environment shifts.
Mostly mid-market and mission-driven. The flat-fee model exists specifically to make serious AI strategy work available to organizations the large consulting firms have structured their pricing to avoid.
First conversation is 30 minutes, free, and intended to figure out whether you actually need us.
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