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Business-first AI for mid-market teams
cb5 AI Value Blueprint. Find the hours. Prove the ROI. Build what matters.
An AI Business Analyst learns how your teams actually work, finds where the hours are going and shows where AI pays for itself, before you spend on technology. Then we help you build it. Hours back, not headcount.
The problem
Mid-market companies have real repetitive volume and real budget, but rarely an AI team of their own. Many have bought AI tools; fewer can point to measurable results. Licenses get bought, adoption stays flat, and leaders are asked “what’s our AI plan?” without a good answer.
A product is chosen first and a problem is found for it later, so the work it takes on is rarely the work that costs the most.
AI lands with IT. IT should own the platform and security, but nobody on the business side owns the outcome.
Without a measure of how long the work takes today, there is no way to prove what AI changed, and no case for the next budget.
A use case picked because it was interesting rather than valuable, with no go/no-go, tends to stop at the demo.
Not sure where you stand? The AI readiness self-assessment scores data, process, technology, people, governance and leadership, and suggests a sensible first step.
Take the self-assessmentWhat we do
A business analyst who knows what AI can actually do. We start with how your people work, not with a product, and technology is the last decision we make.
Microsoft-first: we start with Microsoft 365, Copilot, Copilot Studio and Power Platform you already own before recommending anything new.
Invoice capture and coding, PO matching, month-end reconciliation, variance commentary
Ticket triage and routing, suggested replies, case summaries, knowledge-base answers
Policy Q&A agent, onboarding coordination, job descriptions, interview scheduling
Meeting prep, CRM updates from email and calls, proposal and RFP drafting, pipeline summaries
Order entry from email and PDFs, vendor communications, SOP lookup, status reporting
Clause extraction, contract comparison, intake triage, obligation tracking
How the Blueprint works
A fixed-fee engagement covering one to three business units, such as Finance, Customer Service or HR. It studies people and process; it doesn’t build anything or need access to your production systems.
Executive kickoff, stakeholder interviews and a short time study.
Day-in-the-life sessions, workflow maps, volumes and a data and systems review.
Opportunities scored and valued, with a security and governance check alongside IT.
The 90-day roadmap, executive readout and a recommended pilot.
One business unit runs in three weeks.
Every week you get a status report with progress, risks and cb5’s hours by role against the SOW. cb5 doesn’t bill idle time.
Ways to start
Each step is scoped with you and has a fixed fee agreed up front, and what you spend on one step counts toward the next.
A half-day session, on site or virtual, with your leadership and two or three department heads. We surface the top pain points per team and leave you a short summary of 5–8 candidate opportunities with rough sizing and a recommended Blueprint scope.
Fixed fee. Discovery, baseline, scored opportunities, readiness scorecard, 90-day roadmap and executive readout.
One or two quick wins from the Blueprint, built and tested in a lower environment, released in stages with a go/no-go against a threshold you agree, handed over to your team and measured for 30 days from go-live.
Fee Fixed fee, depending on complexity and integrations. Licenses and platform consumption are bought by you and aren’t in the fee.
A fractional AI Business Analyst to scale to more teams: new discovery, a build backlog, adoption tracking and a quarterly ROI report to leadership.
Term 6–12 month retainer. It reserves capacity each month; unused days don’t roll over.
Every engagement is scoped with you on a short call, and your fixed fee is confirmed in a written proposal before work starts. Pilot success criteria are agreed with you up front and measured; they are targets, not promises.
What the numbers look like
Every Blueprint figure comes from your own baseline, and capacity value is kept apart from hard savings so nothing is counted twice. Here is the arithmetic on a made-up accounts payable team.
| People keying invoices by hand | 10 |
|---|---|
| Hours each per week on manual entry | 6 |
| Salary | $72,000 |
| Loaded hourly rate (salary × 1.3 ÷ 2,080) | $45.00 |
| Working weeks a year | 48 |
| Share of the time the solution takes on (document processing default) | 60% |
| Annual run cost (licenses, support) | $6,000 |
| One-time cost to build (illustrative) | $50,000 |
About 1,728 hours a year the team can put toward other work: backlog, growth, faster service. You decide where the hours go.
None evidenced yet. Capacity becomes cash only where it avoids spend such as overtime, temporary staff, contractors or a planned hire.
Net annual value is annual value less the run cost. Payback and ROI are simple, undiscounted figures. In a Blueprint, your team leads check the people, hours and rates before the readout, and a pilot then measures the real result for 30 days and reports it, above or below target.
How we work with you
The AI Business Analyst who runs discovery stays through the pilot. The architect who assesses feasibility designs the pilot, and designs it for your team to run.
Pilots are built in a test environment first, then released in rings: IT and the project team, then pilot users, then pre-production. Each ring has a go/no-go that you decide.
Every recommendation traces back to a real workflow, pain point and baseline. Every deliverable is reviewed inside cb5 before you see it, and you sign it off in writing.
A weekly status report shows cb5’s hours by role against the SOW. cb5 doesn’t bill idle time.
Security and data
Questions
That’s a good head start. Many companies have licenses but no clear map of which work, in which team, Copilot should take on, so usage stays flat. The Blueprint gives you that map and a measured baseline, so you can show a return on the licenses you already pay for.
IT should own the platform, security and governance. We add the business side: sitting with finance or customer service to work out where AI actually saves time. We work alongside IT and bring them governed, well-defined use cases instead of scattered requests, and we’d like them at the kickoff.
Many good use cases don’t need perfect data: drafting, summarizing, policy Q&A, or reading invoices and emails. The readiness scorecard in the Blueprint shows which use cases are viable today and what needs fixing first. That’s useful even if you decide to wait.
They should. Every figure comes from your own baseline: your people, your hours and your rates, checked by your team leads before the readout. We assume AI takes on only 20–60% of the time, depending on the type of solution, round hours down, and keep capacity value separate from hard savings so nothing is counted twice. Payback includes licenses and support.
The pilot then measures the real result for 30 days and reports it, above or below target. The value method brief sets out the formulas with a worked example your finance team can check.
The Blueprint is built around their week: about an hour per interview, a few 2–4 hour shadowing sessions where we watch the real work, and 10 minutes a day for a short time study. Each team’s champion spends 4–8 hours in total, mostly scheduling and checking our numbers. You get a status report every week.
Our focus is capacity, not headcount: taking the tedious work off people’s plates so they can do the work they were hired for. You decide where the hours go, whether that’s growth, backlog or faster service. The change and adoption plan is built into every pilot, so the team is part of it. cb5 doesn’t turn hours into roles removed.
Pilots usually stall for one of three reasons: no clear business owner, no baseline to prove value, or a use case picked because it was interesting rather than valuable. The Blueprint addresses all three with a named business owner, a measured baseline and use cases ranked by value. Then the pilot runs in stages, with a go/no-go against a threshold you agree before go-live.
You could, and some companies do. The challenge is usually bandwidth and an outside view: team leads are already stretched, and it’s hard to see the waste in your own process. We bring a structured approach, scoring tools and a catalog of common AI patterns, in a Blueprint scoped for 3–4 weeks, and you see our hours by role every week.
Start with a 30-minute discovery call. Bring the team that’s most stretched; we’ll bring the questions.
Not ready to talk? Estimate your hours back or take the readiness self-assessment.