Steve Adolph — SPCT, Advisor, Enterprise Movement · Ola Gedenryd — SPCT, Scaled Agile Affiliated Strategic Advisor for Asia, co-founder of Enterprise Movement
Co-written with Claude.
We ask every leadership team we meet the same question: what has your AI investment returned so far? Most cannot answer it with a number.
That is why we built Value in 45 Days, and why it is now available: your leaders agree where AI should go, which few bets get funded, and what stops; your people get on board; and one real workflow is redesigned by your own team, running in your production and measured against a number your leaders chose before anything was built. It is building a durable capability that lasts.
No new headcount, no parallel programme. Tell us the number you need to move, and we will tell you whether 45 days is enough.
In Don't Automate the Line Shaft we explained why a new technology pays off only when the way of working around it changes. Value in 45 Days is how you start.
Where you are today
The problem is rarely a lack of effort. There are pilots, some of them impressive. There are licences for tools people use to write emails a little faster. Most pilots show the technology can work, and then stall on the way to production, because production means changing how the work is actually done, and nobody owns that change.
Around the table, the leaders do not quite agree where AI should go. Every function has its own list, and the funding follows last year's plan. Closer to the work, people ask whether AI is being done with them or to them. Some are excited; many are quietly worried about what it means for their jobs.
We've been there
We had to redesign our own operating model. The platform behind our business is specified, built and shipped AI-natively by fifteen people, and new modules go from first specification to production in hours or days. You can read how we run our own company. You are not a greenfield, fifteen-person company, but we can share what we learned, and are still learning, about building our operating model. What carries over is knowing which of your constraints still hold and which ones AI has already removed.
We cannot show you a client case study yet; this offer is new. We can show you exactly what happens in each phase of the 45 days.
It is not a technology problem
Technology is not the hard part, and this has happened before. When factories first electrified, the motor was the easy part. The plant engineers knew how to run a factory built around a line shaft; electricity was new to them. The harder problem was replacing an operating model built around a constraint that no longer existed. They had to overcome years of training and experience shaped by a constraint they still assumed, and learn to design a new kind of factory.
AI is the same kind of shift. What holds you back is the operating model and the people: who decides, which approvals and hand-offs still make sense, and whether anyone is allowed to change a process that has always been done one way. Bolt AI onto an operating model built for slow analysis and scarce expertise, and you get the same organisation, a little faster. That is accelerating the past.
And you do not have time for a multi-year AI transformation to fix it. The 45 days are a beginning: on one workflow, your organisation starts to learn what a new operating model could look like for you, and how to build it.
How: three capabilities, built together
Each capability is built on your real workflow. The training is part of the 45 days for a reason that goes beyond knowledge: it gives your leaders, your workforce and your AI-Native Value Architects (the people who will run the method again on the next workflow) the same mental model. When they reason about AI the same way, decisions are less likely to stall in translation between functions, and each group can challenge the others' assumptions.
Leadership: alignment, vision, strategy and funding
Days 1 to 14. Your leadership team leaves aligned on a shared vision, a few funded bets with named owners, and the first workflow, with the number it must move and where it stands today. They get there through a day of Leading the AI-Native Organization, which gives leaders the AI fluency to make these decisions rather than delegate them, and a day building the AI Money Map, which ties your real workflows, each with an owner and a number to move, to your strategy.
The workforce: on the bus, not under it
Days 15 to 21. If the people who run a workflow feel fear and reluctance, the workflow will never run, however good the technology is. So the people who run it spend two days of AI-Native Foundation on the workflow they are about to redesign, and leave having built their first AI agent on their own work. The people who will carry the capability start their AI-Native Value Architect training the same week.
Meanwhile, your engineering or IT contact gets the environment, integrations and access working. "Our data is not ready" is usually true across the enterprise, and it does not have to stop you: we curate the one slice this workflow needs, from the one or two systems that hold it.
Delivery: a return you can measure, starting with one workflow
Days 22 to 40. Your people redesign the workflow and have it, or its first slice, running in your production by day 40.
Alongside them, your AI-Native Value Architects put their training to work. They start with what you have already paid for, the tools and pilots you have funded, and decide which to finish, which to stop and which to build on. Then they carry the new workflow out of pilot and into production, and show what this workflow returned against the baseline your leaders set: the first measured answer to the question you could not answer before. Days 41 to 45 take that reading, write up the controls and hand over.
We work like flight instructors. We demonstrate, your people practise and drive, and we take the controls only when something is at risk of going wrong. Every change is treated as an experiment with a measure, and the evidence decides what to widen and what to stop.
If you lead technology
You have probably built pilots that worked and watched the business not change. This is about that change, and it does not go around you.
- Your controls stay in place. The 45 days compress decision time, not your controls. In week three we list every control gate the workflow must pass, with its owner and lead time, and the workflow goes to those gates as soon as a first version exists, because their lead times are the critical path of the schedule.
- It runs in your environment. The workflow is built there, on data from systems you already control, and goes to production through your own security review and data-access rules.
- Sensitive data is agreed before anyone touches it. In week three we agree how personal and sensitive data is handled in your environment, and the workflow owner signs off the data slice before anything is built.
- The people are named up front: the workflow's owner, the people who run it today, the people who will train as your AI-Native Value Architects, and one person from engineering or IT who can get access and integrations moving. That person is on the critical path, which is why we ask for them by name before day 1.
- Controls become your standard. In the last week, the controls this workflow ran under (named approvers, an audit trail, a way to roll back) are written up as the pattern for your next workflows.
- You are not left maintaining our work. Your people build it, so your people run it. On day 45 we leave a written recommendation for the next workflow, not a maintenance contract.
What you will have on day 45
On day 45 you can inspect the evidence of whether your people can move a number that matters to your strategy:
- the workflow, or a first slice of it chosen on evidence, running in your production and operated by your people, with its number read against day 1, whichever way it moved
- people who can take on the next workflow without us, and a plan your sponsor has agreed
- your own statement of what AI-native means for your organisation
- an honest account of anything that did not go to plan, and what it taught you
Why it is different
Your people drive and we coach, and the result is in your production with a number beside it.
If your workflow needs several teams to coordinate, the 45 days can launch an AI-Native Agile Release Train. AI-Native SAFe is a strong starting point for that coordination, and we bring each of its practices in the way we bring everything else: with a clear idea of what it should improve for you, and evidence about whether it did.
Start the conversation
On your side it takes two days of your leadership team, one named workflow owner, the people who run the workflow today (including two days of AI-Native Foundation), the people from your existing staff who will become your AI-Native Value Architects, and one engineering or IT contact who can get access without a six-week ticket.
Tell us the number you need to move and the workflow you suspect is holding it back, and we will tell you whether 45 days is enough.
