The engagement
We sell trust. The engagement is how you get it.
You are putting artificial intelligence (AI) to work in your company, or you are about to, and you cannot yet say whether you can trust it. We give you that ability on seven counts, shown with evidence rather than asserted, and we start where almost nobody starts, which is before the AI.
The problem we are hired to solve
Most AI starts in the middle.
A leader who decides to put AI to work usually begins where the technology is: at the data lake, at the model or at the pilot. The AI that results does not know what matters to the business, because nobody told it who the organization is, what it holds, who decides or what good looks like. The leader reads the result as a technology failure and buys a better tool, which fails for the same reason.
Every framework and playbook on the market switches on after the decision to build. The lane before that decision is open, and nobody in the organization is assigned to stand in it. We call it the Inception Void, and closing it is the first thing we do.
Where we begin
Step Zero, with the ledger first.
Step Zero captures who the organization is, what it holds, who decides and what good looks like. We begin with the financial ledger, because the ledger is the one record every company already keeps that says what the business actually did. Mission and goals mapped to actual performance, frozen and dated before AI touches the business, is the pre-AI baseline, and it is what lets you show later that the AI paid back.
If you have already started, you do not start over. You back up one step, and we run Step Zero while we take an inventory of what you have already built. What you have built is not wasted. It is unplaced, and placing it is most of the work.
What you hold
One picture of your business, from the first morning.
On the first day you see the finished twin: one picture of your business with every agent, vendor and goal placed on the map of the Trusted Living Agent Framework™, most of it drawn in outline because most of it has not been captured yet. Each step of the engagement turns a part of it solid. Its full name is the Trusted Living Twin. It lives with you by default, it is kept current, and you can take a complete copy of it on any day you choose.
The method
The five steps
Each step named by the problem it answers and the principle it follows. How a step is carried out is shown to a client rather than published.
If you want this
How an engagement begins
Who the first step is for, what we each commit to, the founding price, and how the first conversation starts.
The argument behind this page is set out at length in The Inception Void, an essay by our founder, Dale Martin, in the Journal, with its slide deck.