AI Strategy & Roadmap in Silver Spring, MD

Two days is enough when the inputs are right. The intake before the workshop does most of the heavy lifting — we collect the current stack, team capacity, prior automation attempts, and the one or two business numbers leadership cares about, then come into day one with a candidate list already partly scored. Day one is mapping and discovery; day two is ranking and scope writing. For larger operations — a media shop with three production pods, a services firm with multiple practice areas — we recommend the two-week deep dive instead, because the cross-team interviews can't compress into forty-eight hours without losing fidelity. The two-day works well for owner-led shops where one or two decision-makers can speak for the whole operation. The two-week works better when you need buy-in from practice leads who weren't in the room.

Three factors decide it for a media shop. First, workflow specificity — if your post-production pipeline has a quirk that no off-the-shelf tool handles cleanly (a custom asset-tagging taxonomy, a non-standard delivery format, a client-specific QC checklist), build wins because the buy options force you to bend your workflow to their schema. Second, integration depth — if the automation needs to read from Frame.io, write to Airtable, and trigger a Slack notification with a CDN-hosted preview, the buy options usually charge per-seat for each connector and the math gets ugly fast at scale. Third, and most often the deciding factor in Silver Spring, total cost of ownership over twenty-four months — a fixed-price build with a small retainer typically beats a per-seat SaaS bill once the team grows past four or five regular users. The roadmap output gives you the full breakdown for each shortlisted capability, not just a verdict.

Yes, with the right framing. The strategy engagement won't validate a system for you — that's a separate, much longer process — but it will sort which AI candidates can plausibly live inside a Part 11 envelope and which can't. We score regulated-adjacent capabilities on validation burden, audit-trail requirements, and whether the workflow touches predicate-rule data. A summarizer that runs on internal SOPs and never sees submission content has a very different risk profile from a tool that drafts cover letters going to the agency. The deliverable will tell you which workflows can move into a fixed-price build immediately, which need a validation plan before you commit budget, and which should stay manual until the regulatory landscape on AI in submissions matures further. We'll also flag where a non-AI automation — a deterministic workflow with a logged audit trail — is the cleaner answer than an LLM, which is often the case for regulated work.

The strategy engagement is priced as a fixed fee, not a retainer or a credit toward an implementation. The two-day workshop and the two-week deep dive each have their own fixed price, scoped at the intake call. You pay for the engagement, we deliver the ranked roadmap and Phase 1 scope brief, and you own the artifact — what an AI consultant should actually deliver, a decision artifact rather than a slide deck of possibilities. If you take the brief to another builder, an internal team, or shelf it for six months, that's a fully valid outcome. We don't make the strategy engagement cheaper if you commit to a build with us afterward, and we don't make it more expensive if you don't. Vendor-neutral output means the recommendations have to stand on their own merit — if they only work when we're the builder, they aren't a real roadmap. For Silver Spring operators who want to test the relationship at lower stakes first, the $99 AI readiness audit and the $497 Founder Review Call are smaller on-ramps that tell you whether a full strategy engagement is even the right next step.

Both, and the choice shapes the engagement. On-site workshops happen in Silver Spring, downtown DC, or Bethesda depending on what's logistically easiest for your team — we'll come to your office or book a neutral conference space if your floor plan makes a workshop awkward. On-site is strongly preferred for the two-day format because the whiteboard and in-room dynamic compresses days of async discussion into a single working session. The two-week deep dive runs as a hybrid: a kickoff and a final scoring day in person, with the middle interviews and analysis done remotely. Fully remote engagements are available for clients who can't host on-site, but expect the two-day format to extend to three or four days of video sessions to compensate for the loss of room dynamics. The in-person work is where the real prioritization happens — disagreements between practice leads surface faster across a table than across a Zoom grid.