MIP Strategic

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What’s included

Strategic is the tier for firms where AI is no longer an experiment. It is operational, it is in the budget, and leadership is asking strategic questions about it. We answer those questions.

• Everything in Operate.
• Fractional AI leadership. A named individual on our team — senior engineer or principal — assigned to your account. Standing monthly office hours with your CEO, COO, or managing partner. They show up in your strategy sessions. They review your annual operating plan.
• Custom model deployment. Where regulated data, IP sensitivity, or sovereignty requirements mean commercial cloud LLMs are off the table, we deploy and operate your own models. Azure OpenAI inside your tenant for HIPAA/SOC 2 work. On-prem Ollama (or equivalent open-weights deployment) for ITAR/CMMC environments and high-IP-sensitivity manufacturing.
• AI roadmap tied to your annual operating plan. Not a tech roadmap. A business roadmap with AI as the medium — what changes in the operating plan because of AI, what gets cut, what gets reinvested, what gets new headcount.
• Board-level reporting templates. The AI section of your board deck, written. Risk register entries. Insurance disclosure materials. Defensible AI policy summary for clients and regulators.
• M&A AI due diligence support. Buy-side: an AI program audit on the target — what they actually use, what’s exposed, what to clean up before close. Sell-side: a clean AI dossier as part of your data room.
• Direct engagement with your vendors as your AI representative. When Microsoft, your ERP vendor, your DMS, your insurance broker, or your client wants to talk about AI, we take the meeting on your behalf or with you. We carry your AI policy into those conversations.

What’s not included

Strategic includes nearly everything in the practice. Two boundaries:

• Headcount in your business. We are a fractional partner, not an employee. If you need a full-time Director of AI in your org chart, we will help you write the JD and the rubric for hiring them, and then we will work for them.
• Custom model training from scratch. We deploy and fine-tune models. Pretraining a foundation model is not what most SMBs need; if you have a legitimate case for it, we will tell you and refer you to a research partner.

What the first 90 days look like (if you’re starting at Strategic)

Days 1–21. Operate-equivalent onboarding compressed and intensified. AUP, registry, monitoring, help desk live by Day 14. Fractional lead introduced to your executive team in Week 1, not Week 12. Annual operating plan and current board materials reviewed.

Days 22–60. Custom model deployment scoping and procurement (if applicable). First fractional leadership office hours with your executive team. First custom agent built and live. Vendor relationships mapped.

Days 61–90. First board-format AI section drafted with your CEO. First full ABR. Annual roadmap integrated with your operating plan timing.

When Strategic is not the right tier

Honest: if you don’t have AI in your operating plan yet, Operate is the right tier and Strategic will feel oversized. Most SMBs do their best AI work in Operate for two to four years before stepping to Strategic. We will tell you in the Assessment which tier matches where you actually are, not which tier we’d prefer to sell you.

Book an AI Readiness Assessment

Three weeks. Fixed fee. A real report and a 90-day roadmap. You keep it whether you hire us or not.

Book an AI Readiness Assessment · Or talk to us for 15 minutes — no pitch.