The Assessment
The AI Production-Readiness Assessment
A fixed-scope engagement that tells you, and your board, whether your AI is production-grade and audit-ready. You get a clear answer and a prioritized path to fix what is not, in weeks rather than quarters.
The Offer
Fixed scope. Fixed price. A board-ready answer.
No open-ended discovery and no six-figure transformation. One engagement, one deliverable your leadership can act on.
- Scope
- Fixed
- Investment
- From $8K
- Timeline
- 2 to 3 weeks
- Delivery
- Remote-first
What you get
- An assessment against the four GRADE pillars.Governance and audit-readiness, reliability, observability, and evaluation, each graded against how a mid-market firm actually operates.
- The board-level GRADE Scorecard.A single production-readiness deliverable your board, auditors, and exec team can read without a translator.
- A prioritized remediation path.The gaps that matter, ranked by production and audit risk, with a concrete sequence for closing them.
How It Works
Four steps, start to readout.
Concrete, low-burden, and time-boxed. Your team stays focused on the product while I do the assessment.
Scoping call
A working session to agree on the one or two AI systems in scope, the questions your board is actually asking, and what a passing grade needs to mean for your firm.
Evidence gathering and system review
I review the architecture, prompts, guardrails, logs, and eval coverage, and talk with the people who build and operate it. The burden on your team is a handful of interviews and read access, not a project.
Scorecard and findings
I grade the system against the four GRADE pillars, document the gaps in plain language, and rank them by production and audit risk rather than by how interesting they are to engineers.
Readout with your board or exec team
A live walkthrough of the GRADE Scorecard and the remediation path, in language a non-technical board can act on. You leave knowing what is safe to ship, what is not, and what to fix first.
Who It Is For
Mid-market financial services heading to production.
Banking, insurance, and fintech firms with an AI pilot, an internal copilot, or a vendor AI feature that is moving from experiment to something customers and regulators will touch. If it is about to carry real work, it is in scope.
You do not need an ML platform team or a compliance department. You need to know, with evidence, that the system will not break, leak data, or fail an audit once it is live.
The assessment is built for a regulated context. It accounts for model risk, audit trails, and the EU AI Act deployer timeline as practical considerations, not as a reason to panic. The goal is a clear-eyed grade, not a scare.
After the Assessment
A fractional CTO retainer, when you want it ongoing.
Most firms find the Assessment surfaces more than a weekend of work. The natural continuation is a fractional CTO retainer: ongoing senior capacity to work through the remediation path, guide the next build, and keep the system audit-ready as it grows. It runs in the $5K to $15K per month range depending on scope, and it graduates directly from the Assessment, so there is no second discovery to pay for.
Not sure the full Assessment is the right size yet? A smaller readiness snapshot is available when the scope is still uncertain, so you can start narrow and expand once the picture is clear.
Find out where your AI actually stands.
Start with a scoping call. We agree on what is in scope and what a passing grade means for your firm before any work begins.