The Ground-Up Workshop
Every AI strategy you've been sold starts with vendors.
This one starts with the people who already know where the operational truth lives.
A two-day in-person intensive with a small group of your subject-matter experts — the people who already know where the operational truth lives — plus a synthesis week. You walk out with a target operating model that has AI built into the work, and a 90-day plan to execute it.
Who this is for
Leaders of small-cap and mid-cap companies.
The reader I'm writing this page for has probably walked the worst part of their operation in the last month. The warehouse floor. The shop floor. The dispatch room at 4pm on Friday. The customer-service queue when something has gone visibly wrong. They are the CEO, President, COO, GM, or divisional leader of a manufacturer, distributor, logistics business, specialty industrial, consumer-goods, or healthcare-services company where the operating model was built over decades and the operators on the floor know things the org chart doesn't.
They have been pitched AI by three vendors this quarter. They've walked out of every one of those meetings with the same nagging feeling — the deck didn't actually understand the business. What they suspect, and what the vendors keep skipping, is that the right place for AI inside their business is not where the marketing decks point. It's the specific operational moment where a long-tenured customer relationship gets broken — the one their senior dispatcher, senior planner, or senior service tech could describe in thirty seconds if anyone asked. The Workshop is built to ask. And then to design the operating model around the answer.
If that's the position you're sitting in right now, this is the engagement that starts in the right place. If instead you're a Fortune 100 buyer looking to pilot a stack-wide AI platform, a tech or SaaS company that already lives in AI, or an organization that wants to outsource the strategic thinking and take the deliverable in PowerPoint, the Workshop is not the right engagement and I'd say so on the call. The Workshop only works when the leader who shows up owns the model afterwards.
What you walk out with
A target operating model. A 90-day plan. And the alignment to ship it.
A target operating model
A working document — typically 25-35 pages — with named workflows, named SMEs at each stage, the customer-losing moments AI must attack first, the ones it must not touch, and the trade-offs in between. Mapped to your real operation, not a generic industry diagram. The kind of document your COO can read on a flight and your engineering lead can build from.
A 90-day execution plan
The first thing you ship, who owns it by name, what tooling it needs, what success looks like at day 30 / 60 / 90, and the specific operational metric that tells you it's working. Designed so your team can run it without us. If you want help running it, that's a separate engagement we can talk about — but the plan is yours, in writing, and your team can execute it alone.
Internal alignment
The often under-counted output. By the end of two days, your SMEs, your operations leadership, and you are looking at the same target operating model and using the same language for it. That alignment is what most AI strategy decks fail to produce. It is also the thing that decides whether the 90-day plan ships — or stalls in the next steering-committee meeting.
How it runs
Three weeks. Two days in person. The rest is synthesis.
Pre-work
A 60-minute call with you to scope the SME group (typically 4–6 people — operators, planners, frontline leaders, the senior service tech, the dispatcher). A short pre-read. No homework for the SMEs themselves — we want what's in their heads, not what they think we want to hear.
In-person intensive
Two days at your office or operation. Day one is structured interviews and live mapping with the SME group. Day two is synthesis with you and your operations leadership — we build the target operating model and the 90-day plan together, in the room. You walk out at 4pm on Day 2 with a working draft you've already pressure-tested.
Synthesis & deliverable
We turn the workshop output into a finished deliverable: the target operating model written up as a document your team can use, the 90-day plan with named owners and success criteria, and a short executive briefing you can take to your board if you have one.
Why a workshop, not a platform
Because the answer isn't a platform yet.
Most AI consultancies want to sell you a platform. A six-figure annual subscription. A seat-based license. A multi-year program. They will be happy to tell you what to buy before they understand your business, because the platform pays the platform's bills.
The Workshop is the opposite move. Two days. A flat fee. The output is a target operating model and a 90-day plan, not an invoice trail. After the workshop you may decide to do deeper work with us. You may decide your team can run the plan alone. You may decide the whole thing isn't ready for AI yet and the right answer is to fix the underlying operational problem first. Any of those outcomes is fine. The workshop is calibrated around getting you to the right one.
The workshop is how we start. The deeper work comes after, if and when you're ready.
Who runs it
Grant K. Baldwin.
I'm Grant Baldwin. I write The Brief. I've spent fifteen years working with operating leaders at small-cap and mid-cap companies on operating-model design — first inside a Big Four practice, then through Geniant, the firm I run now. The Craft of AI is the publishing arm — bi-weekly long-form on named operators actually shipping AI inside real businesses, written for the leaders trying to figure out what to do in their own.
The Workshop is the engagement I run a small number of times each quarter for the readers who decide they're ready to do the work for real. You'll work with me directly through both days in person and the synthesis week that follows. If you've been reading The Brief, the voice on the page is the voice in the room.
Two days. $10K. The starting point.
If you want to talk about whether the Workshop fits your business, hit reply.
The fastest way to start is an email. Send me a paragraph about what's pushing you to think about AI right now — the operational moment that's been bothering you, the vendor pitch that didn't land, the question you can't get a straight answer to. I'll come back with a short note on whether the Workshop is the right next step or whether something else is. No deck. No pitch. Just a conversation.
Email Grant about the Workshopgrant@thecraftofai.com — I read everything that comes in.
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