Turning AI ambition into a costed, prioritised roadmap

A SaaS B2B business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

The Discovery phase set out to resolve four challenges before any solution was built.

Cloud Combinator structured the programme so each phase has clear objectives, activities and outputs. Discovery is the phase contracted here; Design, Pilot and Scale form the forward roadmap that Discovery is designed to justify and de-risk.

Discovery is judged against a clear set of sign-off criteria rather than a finished system. It leaves the client with an AI steering committee and functional framework, a fully built-out use-case matrix drawn from in-depth workshops and process maps, and the ability to move into Design with several initiatives aligned across the business and its senior leadership. All targets below are set as forward-looking baselines to be measured through the ROI framework.

• AI steering framework established — An AI Steerco and functional framework is stood up to identify and evaluate opportunities, with named leads across departments and service lines.
• Use-case matrix built — A full portfolio of candidate use cases, spanning CRM data enrichment, search and match, candidate-pack creation and feedback management, is mapped and scored.
• Priorities and blockers understood — Use cases are ranked by complexity, cost and ROI, with a pain-point and data-blockers inventory that quantifies the effort and data work ahead.
• ROI framework defined — Success metrics, baseline capture and a Power BI adoption-and-ROI dashboard template are put in place so value can be measured, not assumed.
• Handover — All Discovery artefacts are indexed in a SharePoint site, ready for the business to progress into the Design phase.

With a validated, prioritised portfolio in hand, the client has a clear path into Design and the two flagship pilots, a Copilot proposal studio and an automated report generator, followed by firm-wide scale-out. The build-operate-transfer model means Cloud Combinator stands the capability up, co-runs it with the client's team, and hands over a documented, self-sustaining operation without lock-in.