Prepare

AI Primer

A three-week consulting engagement to discover and prioritize a roadmap of high-impact AI opportunities, ranked by business value and implementation difficulty, and scoped to reach production fast.

Duration3 weeks
FormatDiscovery, Workshop, Roadmap
OutcomeA prioritized AI roadmap
The opportunity

Decide what to build, before you build it

The Primer replaces opinion and guesswork with a clear, scored plan your stakeholders can stand behind, and a defined first project that can reach production fast.

0
Kickoff to a board-ready roadmap
Top 0
Opportunities detailed and ready to build
0 axes
Value and difficulty scoring on every idea
Who it is for

Leaders who know AI matters but need to decide where to start, with confidence the first project will deliver and reach production.

When to run it

At the start of an AI program, or when a backlog of ideas has stalled and needs an objective, shared way to prioritize.

What it answers

Six questions every AI investment should answer

The Primer answers these before a single line of code is written.

01

What should we build?

02

In what order should we build it?

03

Do we have the right data to build it?

04

Do we have a clear path to production?

05

Can the solution influence behavior?

06

Do we understand the effort and the value?

One principle guides the work: we prioritize AI that delivers measurable business value, and avoid building AI for AI's sake.

How we prioritize

Ranked by value and difficulty, on one shared map

Every candidate is scored on two lenses, then plotted on one map. The quick wins - high value, low difficulty - make the best first thin slices.

Business value → high
Strategic bets

High value, harder

Worth doing once the groundwork is ready. Sequenced, not skipped.

Build first · quick wins

High value, low difficulty

Ships first. The top three become build-ready solution briefs.

Deprioritize

Low value, harder

Parked or dropped. The clearest call on the board.

Fill-ins

Low value, low difficulty

Cheap and easy, but not where the value is. Take them only if nearly free.

high difficulty ← implementation difficulty → low difficulty
Lens 1 · Business value

Strategic fit and KPI alignment, the ability to influence behavior, ease of quantifying impact, cost savings and waste reduction, and new revenue or a data product to take to market.

Lens 2 · Implementation difficulty

Data readiness and granularity, modeling difficulty and proven approaches, fit to your toolsets, and a real path to production with channels to score new data.

The engagement

Three weeks, built around your stakeholders and data

We gather the context in week one, decide together in week two, and deliver the roadmap in week three.

Week 1Week 2Week 3
Week 1 · Discovery
We gather the context
  • Strategic goals, KPIs and how success is measured
  • Data and cloud platform, existing AI and ML tooling
  • Available data: sources, quality, access and governance
  • A long list of candidate opportunities
Week 2 · Workshop
We decide together
  • One working session with your stakeholders
  • Score every idea on value and difficulty
  • Test against data readiness and path to production
  • Prioritize the roadmap in the room
Week 3 · Roadmap
You receive the plan
  • A prioritized AI roadmap and the prioritization map
  • A data readiness assessment
  • The top three worked into build-ready plans
  • Timeline and ROI estimates for each
Your deliverables

What you walk away with

A complete, prioritized AI roadmap, with the top three opportunities worked into build-ready plans. Everything is yours to keep, whether or not you continue with us.

  • Prioritized AI roadmap

    The full scored and sequenced backlog of opportunities.

  • Opportunity prioritization map

    The value-versus-difficulty exhibit for every idea.

  • Data readiness assessment

    Gaps, risks and what to resolve before building.

  • Three solution briefs

    Build-ready plans for the top three thin slices.

  • Path to production plan

    How the first slice gets deployed and maintained.

  • Effort and ROI estimates

    Timeline and expected return for the top three.

Anatomy of a solution brief
  • Problem and KPI the slice moves
  • Data requirements and sources
  • Model and method: GenAI, ML or agent
  • Architecture and path to production
  • Effort, timeline and expected ROI
It also leaves behind

A clear way to de-risk AI before you build, aligned data stakeholders, greater data literacy, and teams ready to build.

An AI-native method

We look across the full range of AI, then ship in thin slices

The Primer evaluates opportunities across four capability areas, then scopes each as a thin vertical slice that reaches production fast and pays for the next.

01

Generative AI

RAG assistants, document intelligence, content generation and search over your data.

02

Agents & automation

Multi-step workflows, copilots and automation of back-office processes.

03

Predictive ML

Forecasting, churn, propensity and risk or fraud scoring.

04

Decision intelligence

Optimization, pricing, routing and recommendation systems.

Each slice is scoped to pay for the next
Slice 1funds the next
Slice 2reuses the data
Slice 3mostly reuse

Early ROI funds the next slice, and the data and platform carry forward, turning isolated wins into a self-funding flywheel.

Why Strongly

The people, process and platform to ship the roadmap

The Primer does not end with a document. If you proceed, we build the first thin slice with you on the Strongly platform, and each slice reuses the last, so the program compounds.

People

Forward deployed engineers build alongside your team, from discovery through production.

  • Born from Pivotal and A42 Labs
  • Embedded with your engineers and analysts
  • Knowledge transfer so your team owns it

Process

A repeatable way to find value, ship a thin slice, and reinvest the return into the next.

  • Value and difficulty scoring on every idea
  • Governance, monitoring and cost control
  • Day Two operations planned from the start

Platform

Workflows, AI apps and MLOps to take a slice to production and keep it running.

  • Model factory and model registry
  • Monitoring, governance and FinOps
  • Your cloud, your VPC or on premises
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Of enterprise transformation experience
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Faster from idea to production
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Lower AI spend through routing and caching
From roadmap to running AI Primer AI Assembly AI Day Two

Ready to build your AI roadmap?

Schedule your AI Primer and turn three weeks into a prioritized, defensible plan with a first project that can reach production.

or email sales@strongly.ai