How long does an AI orchestration deep dive take?
A standard AI orchestration deep dive runs two to four weeks. Week one is discovery — interviews, process mapping and evidence gathering. Weeks two and three are analysis, opportunity sizing and architecture options. Week four, where needed, is stakeholder workshopping and the roadmap write-up.
Week by week
| Stage | What happens | What we need from you |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 — Discovery | Interviews with the people doing the work, process mapping, and gathering evidence of how the process currently performs | Access to four to eight staff for around an hour each, and whatever operational data already exists |
| Weeks 2–3 — Analysis | Opportunity sizing, architecture options per opportunity, risk assessment, and technology selection | Availability for clarifying questions; no scheduled workload |
| Week 4 — Roadmap | Stakeholder workshop, prioritisation against your constraints, and the written roadmap | Decision-makers in one room for half a day |
Two-week engagements are single-process and skip the fourth-week workshop, with the roadmap delivered as a document and walked through in a single session. Four weeks is the norm where more than one team is involved or the recommendation has to be socialised before it will be funded.
Most of the elapsed time is discovery
Analysis is fast. Understanding how a process genuinely runs, as distinct from how it is documented, is not. Almost every deep dive surfaces at least one step that exists only in someone’s head, and those steps are disproportionately the ones automation breaks.
This is why the interviews are with the people doing the work rather than only the people accountable for it. A manager can describe the intended process accurately and still not know about the spreadsheet that reconciles two systems every Friday afternoon.
What makes an engagement run long
- Interview scheduling. This is the single most common cause of slippage, and it is almost entirely within the client’s control.
- Undocumented systems. Where nobody can say what a system does, discovery becomes archaeology.
- Scope discovered mid-engagement. A process that turns out to feed two others is a scope change, and is better handled as one than absorbed silently.
- Decision-maker availability for the final workshop. A roadmap nobody senior has walked through does not get funded.
What happens after
The roadmap is yours, including the technology recommendations, and can be executed by any competent implementation partner. Where NTDG does the build, it is scoped separately once the roadmap exists — either a short sprint against a single opportunity, or an ongoing partnership. Nothing in the deep dive commits you to either.
This question comes up most often in our AI Orchestration & Business Deep Dives engagements.