Cost
Lower programme and running costs: less rework, shorter stabilisation, fewer hours spent on work AI can do.
For example: data and test issues caught before build.
The problem we solve
Your transformation is one of the largest investments you will make this decade. It is built to bring you up to best practice, which is where your competitors are heading too. With AI moving the frontier, arriving at parity means arriving behind.
Every market has a frontier: the most value a company can deliver for a given cost, using the best methods available. A few leaders sit on it. Everyone else sits somewhere below.
Best practice closes the gap to the leaders. Every competitor buying the same standard ends up in the same place, so you arrive at parity.
Early adopters are already pulling away, and the distance between leaders and the rest of the market is growing. Large firms are already three times as likely to use AI as small ones.
New ways to create value appear where the frontier moves. Your programme uncovers the evidence to find them in your processes, data and roles. It has nowhere to value, prioritise or keep them.
Illustrative diagram. Frontier concept: Michael E. Porter, “What Is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, 1996. Adoption: OECD, Emerging divides in the transition to artificial intelligence, 2025 (52% of large firms vs 17% of small firms using AI).
How we measure value
Every opportunity we find is scored against the same five drivers. That lets you compare a finance idea with a supply-chain idea, rank them, and tie each one back to the business case.
Lower programme and running costs: less rework, shorter stabilisation, fewer hours spent on work AI can do.
For example: data and test issues caught before build.
New value the programme makes possible: faster launches, better pricing, services you could not offer before.
For example: a product-launch process that takes weeks off time to shelf.
Processes, data and people prepared so AI can land and be trusted. Your programme already produces most of this.
For example: clean, owned master data kept AI-ready after go-live.
Problems surfaced when they are cheapest to fix: scope, data, adoption and go-live decisions made on evidence.
For example: adoption risk scored by role before funding is committed.
Benefits that start earlier, during the programme, instead of years after go-live.
For example: first AI use cases live before the main cutover.
The drivers score each opportunity. The Business outcomes map shows how they turn into the numbers a CFO reports: growth, margin, cash, productivity and risk exposure.
Where value is lost
Value can slip away at every step between the first idea and the measured result. We close each gap, so you know what your transformation actually returned.
The opportunity surfaces in a workshop and is lost. Discovery captures it.
No baseline, no number, no owner. Each opportunity gets a value case.
The benefit never reaches the design. Benefits are mapped to design decisions.
Cut to protect the date, with no view of the value lost. Scope changes are assessed for value.
Delivered, but the business works around it. Adoption is owned and tracked.
Nobody checks what came back. Results are measured against the approved case.
See it for yourself
Start with the business outcomes your transformation should move. Then see where the benefits land, phase by phase, for the business and for the programme team, and how they are assured and audited.
Each number in the grid counts how many of these six phases give that area a benefit on that driver. A 6 means the benefit is there from discovery to innovation; a 0 means that driver does not apply to that area.
Illustrative, from InnovMates benefits maps. Figures in the calculations are examples, not benchmarks. In a session we build the phase-by-phase version for your own programme and industry.
How to start
Thirty minutes on the why, shaped for who is in the room: an executive advisory session for the board and executive team, an audit compliance session for internal audit and the CFO office, or a programme benefits session for sponsors and programme teams.
Discover the opportunities and map them against your industry, your market and your transformation programme, score them against your value drivers, and agree the ones worth pursuing. What Discovery covers.
The chosen opportunities are mobilised, built into a business case, simulated, launched as pilots, then orchestrated and scaled alongside the transformation, owned, governed and tracked to value. A client journey demo shows all six phases.