How we size AI opportunities
A ranked list beats a long list. Here's the four-size scale we use in every Assessment, what goes into each size, and how sizing turns a pile of ideas into a roadmap.
A long list is not a plan
Ask a leadership team where AI could help and you’ll get a long list within an hour. That’s the easy part. The hard part is deciding what to do first, and that’s where most AI efforts go wrong.
Without a common way to compare ideas, the conversation turns into opinions. The idea with the most enthusiastic sponsor wins. Small, valuable ideas get ignored because they aren’t exciting. Big, risky ideas get approved because they are.
Sizing fixes that. When every opportunity is described the same way and given an honest size, you can put them side by side and make a real decision.
Start from the work, not the technology
We don’t begin with “where can we use AI?” We begin with people.
In an Assessment, we identify the roles that carry the business, from leadership to the front line. For each role, we map the daily work: what they do, where time goes, where work waits on someone else, and where mistakes are expensive. Only then do we ask what AI’s role could be in each task. Draft it, answer it, check it, flag it, or do it outright with a person approving.
Each opportunity gets written up the same way:
- The work today: what happens now, in plain language.
- AI’s role: what the AI would do, and what stays with people.
- The size: how much effort it really is.
- Build or buy: whether an existing tool does the job.
- The risks: what could go wrong, and what we’d need to manage it.
The four sizes
We use four sizes. They’re deliberately coarse. False precision at this stage is worse than useless, because it makes guesses look like commitments.
| Size | Typical duration | What it usually looks like |
|---|---|---|
| S | 1–3 weeks | A focused assistant or automation on one task, using data you already have in one system. |
| M | 1–2 months | An agent or integration that touches a few systems and a handful of roles. |
| L | 3–6 months | A cross-department capability with new data plumbing, governance and training. |
| XL | 6+ months | A program that changes how a core part of the business runs, delivered in stages. |
What pushes an opportunity up a size
Three things move an opportunity from one size to the next more than anything else:
- The data. If the data the AI needs is in one system and reasonably clean, the work stays small. If it’s spread across systems, or lives in spreadsheets and people’s heads, the work grows.
- The number of systems it touches. Reading from one system is simple. Writing back to three, with permissions and audit trails, is not.
- The people change. A tool one team adopts is one thing. A change in how several departments work together needs training, governance and time.
The model itself rarely decides the size. That surprises people, but it’s consistent: the hard parts of AI in a real business are the data, the systems and the people.
From sizes to a top 10
Once every opportunity is sized, ranking becomes a conversation about value and effort instead of opinions. We look for:
- High value, small size. These go to the top. They prove AI works in your business and build trust quickly.
- High value, large size. These go on the roadmap, often broken into smaller stages, with the first stage near the top.
- Low value, any size. These wait, however exciting they sound.
- Better bought than built. These get a recommendation for an existing tool instead of a build.
The output is a ranked map and a top 10 to ship first, with one first-build recommendation and a 90-day roadmap around it.
What this looks like in practice
For one B2B distributor, we mapped the daily work of 11 roles across 8 business areas. That produced 46 sized AI opportunities and a top 10. The first build, a conversational data agent that answers staff questions from live business data, started one week after the roadmap.
That’s the point of sizing. Not a perfect forecast, but a shared, honest picture that lets a leadership team choose deliberately, and start.
Try it on your business
The Opportunity Map preview gives you three sized opportunities from a sentence about your business, in the same format the full Assessment uses. It’s a preview, not a substitute for mapping the real work, but it shows how the thinking goes.