Case study · B2B SaaS
Board signs off £150K after a 3-week audit.
Context
A growing SaaS platform. A board that wanted a number.
A mid-stage B2B SaaS company, 80 people, in their Series B year. The leadership team knew AI belonged in the product and the business, but the board wanted a costed plan, not a slide deck about potential.
They had three months of internal discussion, a spreadsheet of 40+ ideas, and no agreed way to choose between them.
The problem
Too many ideas. No way to rank them.
The problem wasn't a shortage of ambition. It was that every idea looked equally plausible in a meeting, and the cost of picking the wrong three was a wasted year of engineering time.
The exec team needed a way to separate the ideas that would pay back in a quarter from the ones that needed a roadmap, and a governance line for the ones that shouldn't ship at all.
The approach
A 3-week audit with one output: a costed plan.
Three weeks, four workstreams. Interviews with engineering, product, customer success, and finance. Process-mapping where AI could plausibly earn its keep. A scored shortlist against effort, data readiness, risk, and commercial return.
The deliverable was one document: 12 viable use cases, 4 quick wins ready to start inside 30 days, a governance framework for the rest, and a costed 12-month plan the board could sign.
The outcome
£150K signed off in one board meeting.
The plan went to the board at the end of week four and came out with £150K approved for the first phase. Four quick wins started inside the month. The governance framework now sits in the hands of the CTO as the filter for every new AI proposal.
Six months on, two of the four quick wins are in production. The audit paid for itself inside the first phase. That's the point.