AI Activation Roadmap
Build an AI strategy your entire
organization can align around.
A 3–4 week structured engagement that benchmarks your organization's current capabilities, gathers input from every layer of the business, and produces a technology-agnostic roadmap for getting to where you need to be.
- Fixed fee
- No hourly billing
- 3–4 weeks
- Start to final delivery
- Org-wide
- Cross-functional scope
- Interactive
- Report via StrategyAI
Who This Is For
You're ready to make AI a real part of how your organization operates. You need the strategy — and the alignment — to make it stick.
The AI Activation Roadmap is for organizations that have moved past early AI experimentation and need a strategic foundation: a shared view of where you are, where you need to be, and a prioritized path to get there — built with input from every function, not handed down from the top.
Your teams are moving in different directions on AI.
Different functions have different ideas about what AI should do for them — and no one has reconciled those visions into a coherent organizational strategy.
You're being asked to evaluate tools and platforms before you know what you need.
Vendor assessments start from their product. You need a strategy that starts from your capabilities and requirements — so any platform evaluation is grounded in what you actually need to accomplish.
You need alignment, not just a plan.
Leadership, management, and frontline teams all have to believe in the roadmap for it to work. That means they have to have a hand in shaping it — not just receive it.
How It Works
Four phases. Vision to roadmap — in 3–4 weeks.
We've built the process and the platform to move fast without cutting corners. What used to take months now takes 3–4 weeks — because the structure, the stakeholder coordination, and the analysis are systematized. Your team contributes focused, purposeful input at each phase. We handle the rest.
Weeks 1–2
Vision Foundation
We start by establishing common ground across the organization. A collaborative vision session aligns leadership on purpose, guiding principles, and where the business needs to go. Structured capability surveys gather quantitative ratings and narrative input from stakeholders across all functional areas.
Weeks 2–3
Functional Discovery & Benchmarking
We conduct deep-dive discovery sessions with each functional area — documenting how work actually happens today, where systems and processes create friction, and what demonstrable capability looks like versus what teams perceive it to be.
Weeks 2–3
Strategy Development
Validated capability gaps are translated into prioritized strategic initiatives, defined as epics with supporting requirements. A collaborative prioritization workshop aligns leadership on sequencing based on business impact and feasibility.
Weeks 3–4
Readout & Delivery
We present the complete strategy roadmap and findings to leadership in a live executive readout, then hand off the full final documentation package — published as an interactive report your team can access and reference anytime.
What You Receive
A complete strategic foundation — built with your organization, not for it.
Delivered through StrategyAI
The Roadmap runs on StrategyAI, Rainmaker's structured engagement platform. Stakeholders complete secure, personalized capability surveys. Findings are assessed, analyzed, and published as an interactive web report — versioned, accessible online, and available to your team long after the engagement closes.
Finalized Vision Map
A documented articulation of organizational purpose, guiding principles, target experiences, and KPIs — the north star your roadmap is built against and the foundation for cross-functional alignment.
Capability Maturity Assessment Report
A benchmarked view of current-state organizational capabilities across all functions, surfacing where perceived maturity and demonstrable maturity diverge.
Phased Strategic Roadmap
A prioritized, sequenced roadmap of AI initiatives — with epic-level scope and business impact context for each — that leadership can align behind and execute against.
User Stories & Epics
Structured requirements derived from the discovery and benchmarking that can be communicated directly to technology vendors to establish what any platform must deliver.
Why It Works
Technology-agnostic. Cross-functional. Collaborative by design.
Technology-agnostic
We have no platform affiliations and no referral incentives. The roadmap is built around your capabilities and requirements — so when you do evaluate technology, you're evaluating against a clear baseline, not a vendor pitch.
Organization-wide
Unlike function-scoped engagements, the Roadmap captures the full picture: where different functions are, what they need, and how AI strategy across the business can be sequenced and coordinated.
Collaborative by design
The process is built to surface and reconcile different perspectives — not just document them. Stakeholders who shape the roadmap are far more likely to execute it.
Fast by design
What used to take months now takes 3–4 weeks. We built the methodology and the platform to systematize the structure, coordination, and analysis — so you get a complete strategic foundation at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional engagement.
Powered by StrategyAI
Structured delivery from survey to published report.
The Roadmap engagement runs on StrategyAI, Rainmaker's proprietary engagement platform. It coordinates structured capability surveys across your stakeholder group, manages the assessment workflow, and publishes findings as an interactive web report your team can access anytime.
Rather than receiving a static document at the end, your stakeholders have secure, ongoing access to the full findings — including the capability assessment, strategic themes, and recommendations — through a purpose-built report interface.
FAQ
Common questions.
How is this different from a strategy consulting engagement?
We're not generalist strategy consultants. The Roadmap is built on a structured methodology for AI capability assessment — which keeps scope controlled, delivery predictable, and findings grounded in what your teams can demonstrably do today, not just what they think they do.
Who do we need to involve from our team?
A designated executive sponsor plus stakeholders across functional areas for surveys and discovery sessions. The process is designed to be minimal-footprint: every touchpoint is structured, purposeful, and focused. For most participants, that's roughly 1–2 hours per week — a light lift for a strategic output that would otherwise take months and significantly more organizational bandwidth to produce.
What comes after the Roadmap?
The roadmap is yours to execute however makes sense. Common next steps: running platform evaluations using the User Stories and capability baseline we produce, scoping production buildout of prioritized initiatives with Rainmaker, or retaining us for ongoing advisory support as you execute. Nothing is required.
Can this be scoped to just one or two departments?
The Roadmap is designed for organization-wide assessment — that's what produces the cross-functional alignment that makes it valuable. If you need something scoped to a single function, the AI Activation Plan is the better fit: faster, priced accordingly, and built for exactly that.
Scoping & Fit
Let's make sure this is the right engagement for your situation.
Before we begin, we have a focused scoping conversation to confirm fit and configure the engagement for your organization: scope, timeline, stakeholder involvement, and what a successful outcome looks like. No pitch deck — just a direct conversation about whether this is the right engagement for where you are.
Fixed scope, fixed fee. No hourly billing, no scope creep risk.
50% to begin. 50% due at final readout and deliverable handoff.
No retainer. No ongoing commitment required after delivery.
What Comes Next
The roadmap is yours to execute however makes sense.
At handoff, you own everything. Common next steps include:
Technology evaluation
Use the User Stories, Epics, and capability baseline to run a rigorous platform evaluation against what you've established you actually need.
Initiative buildout
Rainmaker can scope and execute any roadmap initiative — whether that's an AI Activation Sprint or a larger production engagement. We produce a scoped SOW for whatever you want to pursue.
Advisory or ongoing support
Some organizations retain Rainmaker to support execution, govern AI adoption, and keep the roadmap current as priorities evolve.
Ready to build an AI strategy your whole organization can execute?
30 minutes. We'll scope the engagement and tell you exactly what you'd get.