Surrogate AI Lead
Surrogate AI Lead is for firms that want a more grounded, business-first way to evaluate AI, automation, and related operating decisions. The goal is to narrow attention to the few moves most likely to create real value.
What this is for
This track is for founder-led firms that know AI and better use of information should matter, but still do not have a clear, practical way to decide what is worth doing. The goal is not to chase every new tool or experiment. It is to create a more grounded way to evaluate opportunities, reduce noise, and focus attention on the few moves that are most likely to matter.
Why it starts with a Sprint
The work starts with the Surrogate AI Sprint. It is a short, practical way to get clear on which AI, automation, and operating decisions are actually worth attention, which ones can wait, and what it would take to support the right next moves. The point is not a deep technical transformation project. It is to make the next decision better and faster.
How the Sprint runs
The Sprint looks at how work, information, and decisions actually move through the business today. That includes how teams spend their time, how key workflows run, where shared data lives and where it is missing, how performance is understood, and how leadership is currently making decisions. It also looks at current tool usage, informal AI experiments already happening inside the business, and places where work feels bottlenecked, duplicated, or too manual.
What you get from the Sprint
The Surrogate AI Sprint gives you a clear summary of what matters, what does not, and where the best near-term opportunities are. That includes a slide deck summary, a short written summary, and a simple roadmap with two to three immediate recommended moves. Each recommendation explains the action itself, why it matters, its relative leverage, a directional view of value, and what people, tools, systems, or support would be needed to make it real.
What can come next
These aren't a menu. The roadmap says where you actually are and what earns the next move.
They often run together. Cadence alongside a Build, a Build alongside an Expansion.
Stand up the first thing that actually runs: a redesigned workflow, the automation underneath it, and the data that shows whether it worked. Not another experiment that ends when attention moves on.
The surrogate lead seat. Someone holds prioritization, keeps the noise out, and stays accountable for the decisions while ownership inside the business is still forming.
Here expansion is people, not tools. Internal champions who can carry the work, clear ownership, and governance light enough to actually hold. A trial workflow ends. A champion continues.
Champions cannot carry something that does not work yet, which is why Expansion follows a working system rather than replacing one. But this is not a ladder. Some firms take the roadmap and run the Build internally, and some never need a Cadence at all.
How execution support works
The roadmap stands on its own. It is usable if you take it and run the work internally, and that is a legitimate outcome rather than an edge case.
Where support is useful, it can mean designing the work and handing it to your team, working side by side with internal champions while they test and learn quickly, or acting as a steady surrogate lead while ownership is still missing.
The right level of involvement is a separate question from which work is worth doing. It is usually settled after the Sprint rather than before it.
Proof
Two examples of the thinking and the deliverables, opened in full. Both are anonymized, and the note on each explains how they were built.
A well-governed brokerage with no pilot history at all needed a defensible place to start. Seven move families were scored the same way, and two were chosen because they ran on data the firm already trusted and could clear a mandatory compliance review. A third was deferred behind a single governance precondition rather than argued for.
Open the case study
The constraint was senior engineer time, not broken process, so the task was precision rather than repair. Most of the seven move families were already fine. Three were selected as co-equal parallel tracks, each with a named owner, a success measure, and a stop-go rule defined before anything started, because the firm's guardrail was that nothing begins informally.
Open the case studyThis is for founders who want a thoughtful, like-for-like conversation about what is really going on in the business, where the drag is, and which next moves look most worth exploring. The goal is not pressure; it is clarity, reflection, and a better read on direction.
Open Discovery Call