The method
01 · The AI Inventory
What the business has already bought, and whether it is integrated into a workflow, owned by someone against a commercial outcome, and actually creating value. This includes the purchases individual teams licensed that never reached a central register. These below-the-line finds are often the most revealing evidence in the whole engagement, and frequently reframe it before the scoring begins.
02 · The walk
The operating model, read across three lenses: Creation, the content, imagery, copy and studio pipeline. Agentic, the feeds, product data and machine discoverability. Process, service operations, merchandising workflow, reporting, reconciliation, and the manual work nobody has counted.
03 · The five foundations
Data, Process, People and Capability, Governance, Commercial Ownership. Each is scored Ready to Build, Contain and Prepare, or Foundations Absent. Most professionally run businesses sit at Contain and Prepare on most foundations, read honestly. That is the ordinary resting place, not a poor result, and Ready to Build is earned rather than assumed.
Stage one, evidence gathered
Nothing is scored yet
What has already been bought
A three-lens walk of the operating model
01
The AI Inventory
What has already been bought, and whether any of it is genuinely used.
02
Creation
Where AI is used to make things, and what that output is worth.
03
Agentic
Where work has been handed to a system to run on its own.
04
Process
The workflow as it is actually walked, not as it is documented.
Then, and only then, scored
Stage two, foundations scored
05Scored
01
Data
Trusted, reachable, current enough to act on.
02
Process
Reliable enough to be automated at all.
03
People and Capability
Who can operate it once it is running.
04
Governance
Who decides, and on what basis.
05
Commercial Ownership
Who owns the payback, by name.
One finding, not five
The finding
The binding constraint
The one foundation holding the operating model back. Everything else waits behind it.
Process appears in both rows and means two different things: the workflow observed on the walk, and the reliability of that workflow once it is scored
It narrows twice. Four evidence sources into five scored foundations, five scored foundations into one binding constraint. Neither stage is skipped, and the middle is where the instrument earns its keep.
04 · The opportunity engine
Every AI opportunity the walk surfaced, named as a specific commercial move rather than a technology, then plotted for value against the effort to build it here. Each one is then tested against the foundation it depends on. Two businesses with an identical opportunity can receive opposite recommendations at this step, because their foundations differ. That is the mechanism, not an inconsistency.
05 · The binding constraint
Across the five foundations, the one whose absence blocks the most opportunity, named directly, with the alternatives rejected and the reasons given.
06 · The working session
Argued with the leadership team, the sequence agreed, the exclusions stated plainly, including where the honest answer is not a technology purchase at all. The written diagnosis remains as the record, not the event.
