Know where AI can create value before you spend more on it.
A costed, sequenced 90-day plan for established UK firms.
Across 3 to 4 weeks I work with the people closest to the work, map the workflows that consume time or constrain capacity, and put a value case against each credible AI opportunity. You leave knowing what to do now, what to test next and what to leave alone.
Direct reply from me within two business days. No sales sequence.
Where should we use AI first?
Most firms do not need more AI ideas. They need an order.
People are trying tools in different corners of the business. A few uses are genuinely helpful. Others create more checking, more risk or no measurable change at all. Leadership can see the activity, but not which opportunity deserves the next pound or the team’s attention.
The AI Opportunity Roadmap turns that uncertainty into a decision your board and operators can both use.
The opportunities with enough value, evidence and readiness to act on.
The opportunities worth a bounded test once the right people, data or process are in place.
The ideas to defer or stop because the value case, foundation or risk does not support them.
It is a diagnostic and prioritisation engagement. It is not an open-ended AI strategy, a tool selection exercise or a transformation programme.
The people closest to the work already know where it hurts.
The useful opportunities rarely begin in a software catalogue. They begin with the person who waits for three approvals, retypes the same information, searches five places for an answer, or spends skilled time turning one output into another.
I interview leadership to understand the business outcome, then work with the people who do the work to see what actually happens. That matters because the written process and the lived process are often different. The exceptions, handoffs and workarounds are where the real cost and the practical opportunity sit.
The result connects operator insight to board-level arithmetic.
The Roadmap turns the Edge Loop into an investment discipline.
The AI Edge is built through a simple loop: pick, test, measure, keep, stack. The Roadmap applies that same discipline across a firm before a larger AI commitment is made.
Choose a workflow that matters to the business, not a tool that happens to be fashionable.
Define the smallest useful test that could prove or disprove the opportunity.
Establish the current time, cost, quality, capacity and risk, then define what a worthwhile result must change.
Set the evidence threshold for scaling, changing or stopping the approach.
Put the credible moves in an order that compounds capability rather than creating more disconnected pilots.
The Edge Loop shapes the judgement. The Sprint Method structures the engagement.
No recommendation earns more budget simply because another firm is doing it. It has to make sense for your work, your people and your numbers.
Six steps from operational friction to a 90-day plan.
Set the outcome
We agree the business question, the workflows in scope and the measures that matter. That might be recovered capacity, a shorter lead time, better quality, lower cost or less operational risk. The boundary is written down before the diagnostic begins.
Map the real work
I speak with leadership and the people doing the work, then map the workflow as it happens now. We capture the steps, systems, decisions, exceptions and handoffs rather than relying on an idealised process document.
Find the bottlenecks
We identify where skilled time is being consumed, where work waits, where information is re-entered, where quality varies and where coordination creates avoidable cost. Not every bottleneck needs AI. The diagnosis separates AI opportunities from ordinary process problems.
Put a value case against each opportunity
Each credible opportunity is quantified using your own frequency, time, cost, quality and risk data. Assumptions stay visible, so finance and operations can challenge the number rather than accept a false promise. Where the evidence is incomplete, the Roadmap gives a range and names what must be measured next.
Rank now, next and not yet
Opportunities are compared by recoverable value, effort, evidence, risk and readiness. Quick wins are separated from bigger bets, and the dependencies that must come first are made explicit.
Build the 90-day sequence
The final Roadmap sets out the first moves, the smallest useful tests, the people involved, the measure of success and the decision each test should unlock. It can recommend an existing tool, a process change, a custom workflow, foundation work or no build at all. The recommendation follows the diagnosis.
One Roadmap your board can approve and your team can act on.
The work is brought together in a concise 15 to 20 page Roadmap and a leadership readout. It is written to support a decision, not to document discovery for its own sake.
Executive decision page
The answer in one page: what to do now, what to test next, what to leave alone and why.
Current workflow maps
The real steps, systems, handoffs, delays and exceptions across the agreed scope.
Costed opportunity records
For each credible opportunity: the current baseline, recoverable value, assumptions, risk, dependencies and recommended first move.
Opportunity matrix
A ranked comparison of the opportunities by value, effort, evidence, risk and readiness.
Foundation gaps
The process, knowledge, data or governance that must be fixed before a higher-value opportunity can work reliably.
Sequenced 90-day plan
The order of work, suggested owners, success measures, stop conditions and the decision each step should unlock.
Leadership readout
A working session to challenge the assumptions, agree the priorities and leave ownership with the people who will act on the plan.
Every opportunity, ranked on one page.
A ranked comparison of the opportunities by value, effort, evidence, risk and readiness.
Quick wins are separated from bigger bets, and the dependencies that must come first are made explicit.
The Roadmap belongs to you. Your internal team, an existing partner or I can use it to shape what happens next.
A better decision before a bigger commitment.
One order instead of a longer list
Leadership can see which opportunities deserve attention now and which should wait.
A number that can be challenged
The value case is built from your own operational baseline, with assumptions and evidence visible.
A safer first test
Each priority move has a bounded starting point, a measure of success and a condition for stopping.
Alignment between the board and the work
The case for action reflects both the commercial outcome and the reality experienced by the people who make it work.
Capability that can compound
The team can repeat the discipline on later opportunities rather than starting from another vendor pitch.
One real workflow returned 486 hours and £33,150 a year.
At NatWest, I rebuilt a structured component review workflow around one engineer working with AI. The original process took five hours across a developer, test analyst and business analyst.
The new workflow produced evidence-linked findings and backlog-ready recommendations in 20 minutes with one engineer. At two reviews a week, that means:
less time and cost per review.
hours of skilled capacity returned each year.
of contractor cost saved each year.
Time moved from producing findings to acting on them.
This was a workflow redesign, not a completed client Roadmap engagement. It shows the evidence discipline behind the Roadmap and the kind of opportunity the diagnostic is designed to find, quantify and prioritise.
AI is a new context. The method comes from more than a decade of experiments for organisations including NatWest, Vitality, RNLI and Farrow & Ball: establish the baseline, test the assumption, measure the result and let the evidence decide what happens next.
Built for established UK firms without a dedicated AI team.
I work with CEOs, MDs and operations leads at established UK firms with £2m to £20m revenue. You are past the founder-only stage and the work now crosses enough people, systems and decisions to make prioritisation valuable. Sector matters less than the shape of the problem.
The Roadmap is usually a good fit when:
It is not the right fit when:
The fee follows the work, not a standard package.
Every firm has a different number of workflows, people and systems in scope. The Roadmap is therefore scoped and quoted per firm rather than sold as a fixed-price template.
The first conversation is free. We establish the question the Roadmap must answer, the likely operational scope, the people involved and whether there is enough access to build a credible baseline.
You see the full scope and fee before you decide. If a smaller engagement or no engagement is the better answer, I will say so.
The Roadmap ends with a decision, not a dependency.
The engagement finishes when the priorities, value cases and 90-day sequence have been delivered and discussed. From there, you can:
Run the first tests with your own team.
Hand the Roadmap to an existing technology or delivery partner.
Ask me to help shape or test a priority solution under a separate scope.
Decide that the evidence does not justify further investment yet.
Implementation is not hidden inside the diagnostic fee and it is not assumed. The purpose of the Roadmap is to make the next investment smaller, clearer and easier to defend.
One senior practitioner, from diagnosis to decision.
I am Steve Quinlan, an AI consultant and product leader who has spent more than a decade finding what changes behaviour, removes friction and moves a measurable number.
My work includes product, conversion and AI experimentation for NatWest, Vitality, RNLI and Farrow & Ball. I have been building production AI workflows inside NatWest since 2023.
Every Roadmap is led by me. I run the interviews, map the work, build the value case and present the final recommendation. I do not sell the engagement and hand it to a junior team.
I am vendor-neutral. If the evidence points to a process fix, an existing feature or doing nothing yet, that is the recommendation.
The things firms ask before we start.
Bring me the workflows. I will help you find the order.
You do not need to know which AI tool you need. Bring the business question, the repeated work and the result you want to improve.
I will tell you whether the AI Opportunity Roadmap is the right first move. If it is, we will agree the scope, evidence and decision it needs to support before the work begins.
I reply within two business days. If the Roadmap is a good fit, you receive a scoped proposal within five working days of the scoping call.