AI advisory for leaders who have to defend the decision.
Independent assessment of where AI belongs in your organisation, what it is worth, and what has to be true before it works. Diagnosis first — instruction second.
Diagnose before you instruct.
The single most expensive mistake we see in Caribbean organisations is buying the intervention before understanding the problem. A company decides "we need AI training", books a session for forty people, and six months later has no measurable change to point to — because the constraint was never staff skill. It was an approval process that added eleven days to every piece of client work, or a data set nobody could query, or a reporting cycle that consumed the same three people every month.
Advisory work exists to prevent that. Before anyone is trained and before a single tool is licensed, the organisation needs an honest answer to four questions: what work is actually being done, where the friction genuinely sits, which of those points are addressable with current AI capability, and what the realistic value is of addressing them. Everything else — training plans, tooling decisions, governance frameworks, hiring — follows from those answers.
This ordering also protects the budget. A diagnosis costs a fraction of an implementation programme and routinely eliminates two-thirds of what an organisation thought it needed to buy.
What an AI capability audit is, and what it produces.
The capability audit is the core diagnostic instrument. It is a structured assessment of an organisation's readiness to adopt AI usefully — not a technology review, and not a vendor comparison. It looks at people, process, data and governance together, because a weakness in any one of them determines the ceiling on all the others.
- Current-state map
- How work actually moves through each function in scope, documented as it is rather than as the org chart implies. This is usually the first time some of it has been written down.
- Capability baseline
- Where staff genuinely sit — from unaware, through informal personal use, to structured application — assessed by function rather than as one organisational average.
- Opportunity register
- Specific, named opportunities with an estimate of time or cost recovered, the effort required, and the dependency that has to be cleared first.
- Risk and governance position
- Where confidential information is currently exposed through unmanaged tool use, what policy exists, and what the minimum viable governance position looks like.
- Sequenced plan
- A prioritised recommendation with a realistic order of operations — what to do in the first ninety days, what to defer, and what to decline entirely.
The audit is commissionable on its own. Scope, timelines and pricing by company size are detailed on the AI capability audit page.
Gap analysis and functional assessment.
Gap analysis
The distance between where the organisation is and where its own stated strategy requires it to be. Not a generic maturity model — the reference point is your plan. A firm intending to double output without adding headcount has a very different gap from one prioritising regulatory defensibility.
Functional assessment
Each function assessed on its own terms. Marketing is judged on content throughput and campaign cycle time; finance on reporting effort and reconciliation; operations on documentation and handover quality; HR on recruitment and internal communication load. Averages hide everything that matters.
Dependency mapping
Most AI opportunities are blocked by something unglamorous — a shared inbox with no structure, a document store nobody maintains, an approval chain with four sign-offs. We identify which dependencies must clear before a recommendation becomes viable.
Value estimation
Each opportunity carries an estimate of recovered hours or avoided cost, stated with its assumptions visible so leadership can challenge the arithmetic rather than accept a headline number.
Boards, chief executives, and heads of function.
- Boards and audit committees
- Usually seeking independence. A board asked to approve significant AI spend wants an assessment that is not produced by the party who benefits from the spend, and wants the risk position stated plainly enough to minute.
- CEOs and managing directors
- Deciding where AI sits in a two- to three-year strategic plan, and how to answer a board that has started asking about it. The output they need is a defensible position, not a tool list.
- Heads of function
- Marketing, operations, finance and HR leaders who can see a specific opportunity in their own area and need it costed, evidenced and sequenced before they can get it funded.
- Founders and owner-managers
- Smaller organisations where the constraint is the founder's own time. Here the advisory work is narrower, faster and usually leads directly into implementation.
Engagement types, the five-step advisory process and how retainers work are set out on the consulting page. Where the recommendation is capability building, delivery runs through corporate training.
Questions leadership teams ask before commissioning.
What is the difference between AI consulting and AI training?
Consulting decides what should change. Training changes what people can do. Advisory work produces a diagnosis, a prioritised set of opportunities and a plan the leadership team can fund; training executes part of that plan. Commissioning training without the diagnosis is how organisations end up teaching the wrong capability to the wrong function.
Do you need access to confidential business information?
Some, and it is handled under NDA. Typically that means process documentation, an outline of your systems, anonymised examples of recurring work and access to the people who actually do it. We do not need customer data or financial records to complete a capability assessment.
How long does an advisory engagement take?
A capability audit is normally two to four weeks depending on the number of functions in scope. Retained advisory runs monthly. A single strategy workshop is a day, with preparation before and a written output after.
Do you implement, or only advise?
Both, but deliberately separated. The diagnostic work is delivered first and stands on its own — you can take the report to another implementer, or to nobody at all. Where we do implement, it is through Amplifi's training, Studio or product teams, and it is scoped as separate work so the advice is never shaped by what is convenient to sell.
Who typically commissions this work?
Boards and audit committees needing an independent view before approving spend, CEOs and managing directors deciding where AI belongs in a strategic plan, and heads of function — marketing, operations, HR, finance — who need to justify a specific investment internally.
Do you work with organisations outside Barbados?
Yes. Engagements run across Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana and the OECS, and further afield where the context fits. Discovery and most working sessions are virtual; on-site time is quoted separately.
What does an engagement cost?
Capability audits start from $1,500 USD depending on organisation size and the number of functions assessed. Retainers and larger enablement programmes are quoted after discovery, with a written proposal returned within 48 hours. All pricing is in USD.
Get the diagnosis before you fund the programme.
A 30-minute discovery call is enough to establish whether an audit, a retainer or a single strategy workshop is the right instrument for your situation.
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