A 300-person professional services firm knew it needed to do something with AI. Every board meeting for the past year had included a discussion about it. Several partners had experimented with ChatGPT and Copilot individually, but the firm had no strategy, no governance framework, and no clear view of where AI could actually make a material difference to the business.
The CTO was under pressure to produce a plan but did not want to commission a generic AI strategy from one of the large consultancies. He had seen too many 80-page reports that sat in a drawer. He wanted something practical that would lead to implementation within a quarter.
"Every AI conversation we had before this felt theoretical. The assessment cut through the noise and told us exactly where to start. Ninety days later, we had a working tool that was saving our consultants a day a week. That is the kind of progress that gets a board's attention."
We started with our AI Readiness Assessment - a 14-day diagnostic that evaluates three things: where the firm's data actually sits and how usable it is, which operational processes have the highest potential for AI-assisted improvement, and how culturally ready the organisation is to adopt AI tools.
The assessment identified over a dozen potential use cases, which we scored and ranked by impact, feasibility, and risk. Three stood out clearly: automated first-draft proposal generation (which was consuming 15-20 hours of senior consultant time per week), intelligent document summarisation for due diligence work, and a knowledge management layer that could surface relevant past work when consultants were scoping new projects.
We designed and built the proposal generation tool as a 90-day sprint. The system ingested the firm's library of past proposals, case studies, and methodology documents, and produced structured first drafts based on a brief entered by the consultant. Every output included citations to source material and required human review before submission.
Proposal turnaround time dropped by 60%. Consultants reported that the tool handled roughly 70% of the first-draft work, freeing them to focus on the strategic and creative elements. The firm estimated this saved approximately 12 hours of senior consultant time per week across the practice.
The knowledge management and document summarisation use cases were commissioned as second and third sprints, with clear scope and success criteria defined during the original assessment.
