Digital Maturity Diagnostic
Scored by dimension (data, processes, architecture, governance and people), benchmarked against sector peers. Where you stand, relative to whoever competes with you.
AI Inception · Executive Diagnostic
In four weeks you will know where AI creates profit in your operation, and where it only creates cost.
AI Inception is the engineering stage that comes before the build: fixed scope, fixed fee, and a one-page value thesis ready for your board. It does not end in a recommendation, it ends in the design of what is worth building, and whoever builds it next can be our own engineering, with AI, automation and industrial software under one technical accountability. Built for mid-market manufacturing, logistics, commerce and education operations that have already invested in technology and cannot afford to get the next bet wrong.
São Paulo · Miami · Lisbon · London · One senior partner per diagnostic
Qualification
Before what we deliver, who should and who should not do this.
AI Inception is for you if:
- Your company has between 50 and 500 employees and runs processes that grow faster than the systems.
- You have heard three AI proposals and none of them explained the return as a number.
- There is pressure from the board, headquarters or the market to “do something with AI”, and nobody has defined what.
- You need to decide whether to replace, integrate or sustain the systems you already have.
It is not for you if:
- The technical scope is already defined and validated. Then what is missing is not a diagnostic, it is execution: that conversation goes straight to our engineering, skipping this page.
- You are after an AI proof of concept with no intention of changing process. Technology does not fix a broken process; it accelerates it.
- The decision does not reach the executive team. Without access to the decision-maker, the diagnostic never leaves the page, and we decline the project.
Deliverables
Four deliverables. All yours, with no contractual strings.
Prioritised Initiative Portfolio
5 to 8 opportunities ranked by estimated EBITDA impact, effort, risk and data density. With what not to do explicitly flagged and justified.
One-page Value Thesis
The document that reaches the board table: where to start, investment, expected return, timeline and contingency plan. One page, because boards do not read twenty.
12-month Roadmap
Sequenced by value waves, protecting cash and avoiding the rewrite that costs three times more later.
Intellectual property
All four deliverables are yours. Take them to any vendor, including a competitor of ours, without asking us. And if you choose to build with us, the roadmap already comes in the format our engineering executes from: zero specification rework between the diagnostic and the build.
Schedule
What the four weeks look like.
Fixed scope, published schedule, and your team’s attention cost declared before we start.
Immersion
Executive and process-owner interviews, indicator review, mapping of systems and live contracts.
You receive: a critical process map and a real technology inventory.
4h executive + 6h managersX-Ray
We quantify where margin leaks: rework, cycle time, brittle dependencies, untrusted data.
You receive: a Digital Maturity Diagnostic with sector benchmark.
2h validationPrioritisation
We weigh financial impact, effort, risk and data density to separate real opportunity from expensive fashion.
You receive: 5 to 8 initiatives ranked by EBITDA impact.
3h board workshopThesis
Where to start, what it costs, what it returns, how long it takes, and the plan if it fails.
You receive: one-page Value Thesis + technical dossier + 12-month roadmap.
2h presentationTotal ask on your executive team: 11 hours across four weeks.
It is the cheapest commitment you will assess this quarter, and the only one whose final product is useful even if you decide not to continue with us.
After the four weeks
The diagnostic exists so the build starts in the right place. The build is ours too.
At the end of week 4 there are three paths, and all three are legitimate. We tell you which one we recommend, in writing, and the criterion comes with it.
Build with our engineering
The approved roadmap becomes a project: applied AI, computer vision, data architecture, automation, instrumentation and industrial software under the same technical accountability that signed the thesis. It is the path most clients choose, and it is what we do best.
Build with your own team
The deliverables are portable and the roadmap ships in executable form. If your team has the capacity, it builds, and we can stay only on the technical governance of what was specified, or step out entirely.
Do not build yet
It is a possible conclusion and it has been our recommendation more than once. You save the investment and take to your board a defensible written argument for why waiting is the correct decision right now.
Investment
A fixed fee, defined before we start. And stated in the first conversation, not the third.
AI Inception is an engineering mandate with fixed scope and fixed fee, sized by the scale of your operation and the number of sites in scope. You get the final figure in the first conversation, not after a cycle of discovery meetings disguised as diagnosis.
What the fee guarantees: all four weeks, all four deliverables, the accountable senior partner and full IP of the material. There is no diagnostic change order. If scope shifts because we misjudged it, we absorb the cost.
The arithmetic that matters, and it does not depend on our price
If the diagnostic prevents one wrong technology investment, it pays for itself many times over. If it surfaces one AI initiative with real return, it changes your year. If it concludes that you should not invest yet, you save millions and gain a defensible argument for your board.
In all three possible outcomes, the diagnostic is the cheapest item in the decision.
Request scope and fee
A partner replies within one business day.
No diagnostic budget approved yet? Start with the Technical Feasibility Assessment, at no cost: a working session with a partner and a written one-page opinion on what can be built today, what cannot yet, and which data is missing. Many of our mandates began exactly that way. Request the free assessment →
Objections
Answered without hedging.
“Our data is a mess. It makes no sense to talk about AI yet.”
That is exactly why the diagnostic exists. Half the value of AI Inception is finding out what needs fixing first, in what order, and how much of it our engineering resolves next. A company with well-organised data usually skips this stage and goes straight to the build.
“We already have an IT team.”
Good, we work with them, not over them. Your team knows the operation better than any outside vendor ever will; what is usually missing is time, technical challenge and specialist capacity in AI, automation and industrial integration. We fill those gaps and we stay as long as the build requires, not one day longer.
“We are too small for a project this size.”
The size our methodology fits best is precisely yours: big enough for disorganisation to be expensive, small enough for one decision to change the year. A much larger operation already has four vendors embedded and a governance layer that stalls change before it starts.
“What if the diagnostic concludes we should not invest in AI now?”
Then we saved you millions and you hold, in writing, a defensible argument for your board. We have delivered that conclusion before. It is the most unpopular and most valuable recommendation we make.
“Will I be locked in to you afterwards?”
No. The IP is yours, the deliverables are portable, and the build is a separate decision under a separate contract. We want to build what the diagnostic approves, and we say so plainly, but the choice stays yours: roughly a third of the diagnostics we run never become our project, and that is a sign the model works.
Availability
Next quarter has a limited number of slots.
One senior partner runs one diagnostic at a time. This is not marketing scarcity, it is the limit of whoever delivers.
Received. A partner replies within one business day, with scope and fee.
If you would like a head start, the piece that helps most before the first meeting: