What you're booking
Duration
2 weeks
Team
Led by a named principal, backed by Opreto's senior engineers
Outcome
Your first move — modeled, derisked, in writing
Fee
$18,000 USD fixed
Why AI initiatives stall in engineering organizations
If you've been around enough AI initiatives, you know how this story usually ends. The model works in a notebook. The pilot impresses someone. Then the production system runs into compliance, cost, observability, or measurement, and the project stalls, drifts, and quietly dies. Most AI failures aren't model failures. They're failures of the system around the model. And underneath those, they're failures of decision — without one, no plan; without a plan, nothing ships.
-
Picked, not decided
Your first AI project gets picked because a vendor demo landed, not because it touches anything that actually matters in your operation.
-
No production reality check
Tools get picked before anyone asks how they'll behave in production. Compliance, multi-tenancy, observability, cost at scale. The pilot works. Production doesn't.
-
No measurement plan
Nobody baselined the workflow before AI got involved. So there's no honest way to say whether anything actually improved — and no defensible way to decide whether to double down or kill it.
-
No plan, only decks
You can show your board activity. You can't show them a decision. They ask for a plan, and what you've got are vendor decks.
What AI Compass is
AI Compass is a 2-week engagement, led by a senior Opreto engineer. By the end of two weeks, your team and the executive sponsor have what they need to commit to one initiative with confidence. If you've sat through enough vendor pitches, you know how the script usually runs. Here's how this one is different:
| What this often looks like | What AI Compass delivers |
|---|---|
| A strategy deck for the board | A decision document, grounded in the realities of your stack and your constraints |
| A vendor demo cycle | Independent technical evaluation by a senior engineer with nothing to sell you |
| An open-ended roadmap exercise | A fixed 2-week engagement with a hard end date — four deliverables that ground the decision, and one that is the decision |
| ROI projections built to justify a decision already made | Baseline, target, payback period — modeled before the decision |
| A workshop that produces consensus | A scoring rubric — value, feasibility, risk, conviction — you can defend in front of a steering committee |
Who this is for
- Engineering leaders — under pressure to show measurable AI progress this year.
- Teams with a mandate — ready for AI, with no defensible first move.
- Teams with ideas in flight — and no good way to choose between them.
- Teams in mid-flight uncertainty — unsure whether to push through, pivot, or stop on existing AI work.
- Teams in regulated environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST) — where the decision has to account for compliance from the first day, not the second pilot.
- Executive sponsors — needing a defensible plan for the board, not a deck.
Where AI Compass goes deep: AI-driven analytics
Analytics is one of the most common places AI initiatives land in engineering organizations, and one of the places where production-stage failures hide in specific, repeatable patterns. Natural-language querying over warehouses. AI-augmented dashboards. Embedded analytics inside customer-facing products. The Compass is built for exactly these kinds of decisions.
-
Natural-language querying over your data
Whether your users, internal teams or your own customers, should be able to ask English questions of your warehouse, and how reliably production can handle it. Compass evaluates the platforms, the data-model work required, hallucination tolerance, and the cost model when query volume scales.
-
Embedded analytics inside your product
When analytics is a feature your customers see, 'should we add AI?' isn't the question — 'where, with what governance, and at what unit economics?' is. Compass models the customer-visible behavior against the engineering work behind it.
-
AI-augmented dashboards and insight generation
Auto-generated charts, anomaly detection, narrative summaries. These survive a demo. Whether they survive your data quality, your user base, and your audit posture is what Compass figures out before you commit.
What two weeks looks like
Four phases, two weeks, one principal. We start where you are, work through what's actually in front of you, and leave your team with a decision in writing.
Discovery (Days 1-3)
We sit down with 5 to 8 stakeholders across engineering, product, security, and operations. We walk through the architecture of the systems in scope. We take stock of the AI work and tooling you've already started.
Identification and scoring (Days 4-5)
We surface candidate AI opportunities and score them against four criteria: value potential, technical feasibility, risk profile, and executive conviction. Your team's existing ideas go on the list. So do ours, sharpened by what the principal has seen work and break in production.
Deep evaluation (Days 6-9)
We evaluate the top candidate in depth. We document the architecture. We map the vendor and tooling landscape against your stack and your compliance posture. We model the economics.
Readout (Day 10)
A 90-minute readout to the engineering leadership and the executive sponsor. We hand over all the deliverables. You leave with what you need for a go/no-go decision.
What you walk away with
Every Compass produces the same five deliverables. Four that ground the decision. One that is the decision.
-
A scored AI opportunity shortlist
A ranked shortlist of every credible candidate, scored against value, feasibility, risk, and conviction. Your team's ideas are on the list. So are ours. The rubric is defensible enough to take to a steering committee.
-
An Architecture Decision Record for the top candidate
A production-grade ADR. System design, data flow, security model, tenancy, vendor selection, failure modes. The same format we use on our own engineering builds.
-
A tooling and vendor landscape map
Stack-specific recommendations across LLM providers (with BAA availability where it matters), agent frameworks, evaluation tooling, embedded analytics with natural-language querying, and observability. What to use, what to avoid, what to wait on.
-
An economic evaluation
Baseline metric, target metric, cost model (build, run, vendor fees), payback period — real numbers, the same ones you'll measure against to prove the build worked.
-
A go/no-go decision document with a scoped next step
The decision is the deliverable, either way. If it's a go, this document includes a proposed engineering build with a timeline, a named team, and a price. If it's a no-go, this document includes the rationale and what would change the answer. The four other deliverables are yours, go or no-go.
When this is not the right step
There are situations where the Compass isn't the right step, and we'd rather say so up front than waste your two weeks. If any of these is your situation, we can probably point you at something better.
| If this is you... | Here's what to do |
|---|---|
| You already have a validated AI initiative scoped and ready to build. | Skip the Compass — talk to us about the build. |
| You're looking for a strategy deck for a board presentation. | Compass isn't the tool. We make decision documents, not decks. |
| Your engineering leadership isn't aligned that AI is a priority. | Solve that first. The Compass works once leadership is aligned. |
| You want us to evaluate AI without engaging with your stack, your data, or your compliance posture. | Compass is engineering work, not advisory theater. Look elsewhere for that. |
Where you go from here
The Compass is the first step. AI isn't something you adopt as a project — it's a capability your organization grows through real engineering work, one stage at a time. Each stage compounds on the last. You commit to the next only when the previous has earned it.
-
AI Compass
2 weeks. Decide what to build first.
-
Engineering Build
Weeks to months. Same principal, larger Opreto team. We build and ship the first proven workflow into production, measured against the baseline set in the Compass.
-
Embedded Team
Ongoing. An Opreto engineering team embedded with yours, for sustained execution against your AI roadmap.
Who runs your Compass
Every Compass is led by one of our senior architects. We name your principal when you sign. Meet two of them below.
About Alan
Alan has been architecting software for over two decades, with a focus on bridging the gap between business needs and what engineering can actually deliver. As one of Opreto's lead architects, he brings that pragmatism to Compass evaluations, where deciding what to build is the whole game.
About Xavier
Xavier has been an agile software architect for two decades, focused on applying design rigor to complex business systems. His specialty is the moment of architectural decision, where the right call early can save months of rebuilding later. That's exactly the work the Compass is built around.
Common questions
Because the deliverables are defined. We're not selling time, we're selling the artifacts your team needs to commit to a decision. We publish the fee so you can budget the engagement without going through procurement. The artifacts are yours — to execute with us, internally, or with another partner.
A named principal, at the architect or senior engineer level. We name them when you sign. The principal has Opreto's full bench available for sanity checks and stack-specific expertise — but the work, the writing, and the recommendation come from one engineer, not a committee. The principal who runs the Compass is the same engineer who would lead any follow-on engagement. No sales-to-delivery handoff.
No. The Compass works against architectural documentation, stakeholder interviews, and representative or sanitized data. If the engagement benefits from real data and the access is easy to arrange, we use it. If not, we work without it. We don't gate the timeline on data access negotiations.
We work with teams operating under SOC 2, HIPAA, HITRUST, and similar compliance constraints, and operate under an active BAA where healthcare data is involved. The Compass treats compliance and security as first-class evaluation criteria, not afterthoughts.
Most engineering organizations have. We evaluate what's already in flight against the same rubric as new candidates. Then we say whether the existing work has the leverage to keep going, or whether you'd be better off redirecting effort.
A 90-minute working session with the engineering leadership and the executive sponsor. We walk through the shortlist, the scoring, the ADR for the top candidate, the economics, and the recommendation. You get all five deliverables in writing. You leave the readout with what your team needs to make a go/no-go decision.
Decide what to build first.
Two weeks. A fixed fee. A modeled, derisked first move you can take to the board on Monday.