90-Day AI Launchpad
One stuck initiative taken from demo to dependable production. The audit’s roadmap, executed — I start on day 1 with access, context, and the failure map already in hand. Hitting the ground running isn’t a metaphor; it’s the design.
90 days. Weekly proof. No black box.
Every Launchpad runs on the same cadence: weekly demos, weekly numbers, production deploys from week two. Here's what your team sees, milestone by milestone.
Build begins — roadmap in hand
No discovery phase, no warm-up. The audit already drew the failure map, set the eval bar, and shipped the first fix. Day 1 is the first sprint, scoped to the highest-ROI failure path on the roadmap.
- — Sprint 1 scoped and started
- — Success metric locked with your decision-maker
- — Working cadence set: weekly demo, weekly numbers
First hardened path in staging
The first roadmap item is rebuilt for dependability and measured against the eval bar from the audit. Your engineers review the approach before anything moves toward production.
- — Hardened path passing evals in staging
- — Regression suite for the path
- — Your team's first review checkpoint
First production deploy
Behind a feature flag, with a controlled blast radius. Real traffic starts teaching lessons staging never could — and the instrumentation captures all of it.
- — Flagged production deploy
- — Live traces: what the AI did and why
- — Rollback path tested, not assumed
Eval harness gating releases
Quality scores now decide what ships — not vibes, not the loudest voice. Human-in-the-loop review handles the judgment calls the metrics can't.
- — Eval harness wired into the release path
- — Human review loop for low-confidence outputs
- — Quality dashboard your leadership can read
Cost ceilings and scale, proven
Per-call economics are visible and capped. Load behavior is tested, not hoped for. By now your team is running the weekly cadence with me, not watching it.
- — Per-call cost instrumentation with budget alerts
- — Load and failure-mode testing at target scale
- — Model/vendor decisions revisited against real unit economics
Dependable production, handed over
The initiative that was stuck is live, instrumented, and cost-controlled — and your team owns it. Code, evals, dashboards, runbooks, decisions. I make myself unnecessary on purpose.
- — Production system, live with real users
- — Full handover: runbooks, docs, walkthroughs
- — 90-day operating plan your team runs without me
Everything ships. Everything transfers.
The Launchpad is a fixed-fee, fixed-duration engagement. The scope is set by the audit roadmap — which you've already seen and prioritized before day 1.
- Production-hardened AI feature — live with real users, measured against the eval bar, dependable under real load.
- Eval harness + human-in-the-loop review — wired into your release path, owned by your team at handover, kept long after I’m gone.
- Cost instrumentation — per-call economics, budget ceilings, alerts. Inference becomes a managed line item, not a surprise.
- Observability — you see what the AI did and why, every time. Debugging stops being archaeology.
- Handover by design — runbooks, docs, walkthroughs, and a team that's been inside the work since week one.
After day 90
Many clients keep me on as their Fractional Head of AI — ongoing ownership of evals, cost control, and build/buy/kill decisions. That conversation happens during the work, once you’ve seen how I operate.
The initiative that's been stuck for two quarters can be live in one.
The Launchpad begins where the audit ends — so the first step is a 30-minute scoping call. Fixed fees on both, the audit credited toward the build.
Every note is read by me, not a funnel. — Mayur Sethi