Know what to build. And what to ignore.

The pilot graveyard

AI initiatives rarely fail on the model. They fail on scope — the wrong problem, the wrong data, no named owner, and a business case nobody ever wrote down. None of that shows up at the demo. It shows up a year later, at budget review.

• Several proofs of concept. None of them carrying real traffic.
• Every vendor demo works — on the vendor’s data.
• Nobody can state what year one costs, or what it returns.
• Your best engineers are comparing tools instead of shipping.

A roadmap you can actually fund

We talk to the people who do the work, read the systems you already run, and score every opportunity on value, effort, and time to first result. Then we tell you which three to start, which nine to drop, and what each survivor costs to run for a year.

• Opportunity map scoring every candidate on value, effort, and time to first result
• A build / buy / ignore call on each one, with the reasoning written down
• Reference architecture that fits the stack you already run, not a greenfield rewrite
• Cost model covering infrastructure, model spend, and the people to operate it
• Risk register: data, compliance, vendor lock-in, and how each one fails
• A 90-day plan whose first deliverable comes with acceptance criteria

1. 01

   Listen

   Interviews with the people who actually run the process, plus a direct read of your code, data, and constraints.

2. 02

   Map

   Every candidate scored on the same axes, so the comparison stops depending on who argues hardest in the room.

3. 03

   Decide

   A working session where we kill the weak ideas together and commit to the few that pay.

4. 04

   Plan

   Architecture, cost model, and a 90-day sequence — handed over ready to execute, by us or by your team.

The judgment behind the roadmap comes from delivery, not theory. A custom analytics platform that beat BigQuery by 50× while cutting infrastructure cost more than 80%. A secure multi-tenant platform for a German legal tech company, with strict data isolation across claims, foreclosure, and dunning. Infrastructure work for Fortune 500 clients including StoneX Group. We only recommend what we have had to operate ourselves.

• We already have an internal AI team.

  Then you don’t need builders. You need a second opinion that isn’t attached to last quarter’s decision. We work alongside internal teams often, and the roadmap is theirs to run — including the parts where they were already right.

• How is this different from a large consultancy?

  You get the people who write the code. No pyramid, no handoff to a team you never met, no 200-page appendix defending the invoice. The deliverable is architecture and a cost model, not a deck.

• Can you have something ready for our board next week?

  No. A roadmap worth funding needs interviews and a real look at your systems; anything faster is a slide deck with your logo on it. If the deadline is fixed and immovable, we would rather decline than hand you a plan we cannot defend.

• What if the answer is ‘don’t use AI here’?

  Then that is the answer, and it is the cheapest one you will ever buy. Sometimes the fix is a database index and a clearer process. We would rather tell you that in week two than sell you a model that quietly underperforms a spreadsheet.