Give me 7 days. I'll show you what AI can do for your business.

The short answer

The 7-day AI sprint is a fixed, one-week engagement for growing businesses that want to know, with numbers, what AI can do for them. In seven days Rickey reviews how the business makes money, finds where AI would return the most, and hands over a ranked plan the leadership team can act on the following Monday.

It is the first step for most clients, and it is designed to be low-risk: one week, one senior strategist, one clear output.

Who the sprint is for

The sprint fits businesses with roughly 20 to 500 people that have:

• Tried AI, without a result. Staff use chat tools, a pilot or two has run, and nothing has changed the numbers.
• A leadership team asking for a plan. The owners or the board want to know where AI fits, and nobody has had the time to answer properly.
• Manual work that limits growth. Sales follow-up, customer service, content, reporting or operations are growing faster than the team.

It is not a fit if you need a large custom software build scoped in a week, or if nobody in leadership can give it two short conversations.

What happens in the 7 days

Day 1: the commercial problem. A working session with the leadership team on where revenue, margin or time is being lost. The sprint starts from the business, not from the technology.

Days 2 and 3: the evidence. A review of the numbers, the customer journey, the current tools and the work your team repeats every week. Short interviews with the people who do that work.

Days 4 and 5: the opportunities. Every candidate use of AI is scored on return, effort and risk. Most businesses end up with 10 to 20 ideas; the sprint ranks them and keeps the ones that pay back.

Day 6: the plan. The top three opportunities become a 90-day plan: what to build, in which tools, who owns it, what it costs to run, and the measure that proves it worked.

Day 7: the readout. A one-hour session with the leadership team to walk through the findings and agree the first move.

What you leave with

• An AI readiness assessment of your data, tools, team and processes, in plain language and focused on what is ready to use now.
• A ranked list of AI opportunities, each with an estimated return, the effort involved and the main risk.
• A 90-day plan for the top three, with owners and measures.
• Guardrails for using AI safely: which data may be used, where a human approves, and how accuracy is checked.
• A clear next step, whether that is your own team running the plan, a short build engagement, or ongoing fractional Chief AI Officer leadership.

An AI readiness assessment that ends in a decision

Generic AI readiness assessments score a business against a checklist of data maturity, skills and infrastructure. That is useful for a large enterprise planning a multi-year program. For a growing business it usually produces a score and no decision.

The sprint asks a narrower question: where will AI make or save money in this business in the next 90 days, and what has to be true for that to work? Readiness is assessed only where it affects that answer.

The gap the sprint closes is a common one. McKinsey's State of AI research found that nearly two-thirds of organisations have not yet moved beyond experimenting and piloting (summarised by Axial Search). The usual reason is not the technology; it is that no one has ranked the opportunities and committed to one.

How to start

Every engagement starts with a one-hour Private Executive Consultation for $250. In that hour Rickey learns how the business works, you get an honest view of where AI could pay back, and you both decide whether a sprint is the right next step. The sprint itself is scoped and priced after the call, around the size of the business.

Rickey works with two to three businesses at a time, so sprint start dates are limited.

Why Rickey Singh

Rickey has spent more than 20 years helping startups and global brands, including BMW, Domino's, GAP and Campa, grow through strategy, technology and now AI. You work with him directly, not with an account team. See the selected work for case studies, or find your city in the United States and Australia.

Frequently asked questions

What is a 7-day AI sprint? A fixed one-week engagement that assesses where AI would return the most in your business and ends with a ranked list of opportunities and a 90-day plan.

How is this different from an AI readiness assessment? It includes one, but it does not stop at a score. The readiness review covers only what affects the top opportunities, and the output is a plan with owners and measures.

How much of my team's time does the sprint need? Two leadership sessions of about an hour each, plus short interviews with the people closest to the work. Most of the sprint runs in the background.

Do we need clean data or an AI team first? No. Part of the sprint is finding out which opportunities work with the data and tools you already have.

How much does the sprint cost? It is scoped after the $250 Private Executive Consultation, around the size of the business and what needs reviewing.

What happens after the sprint? You can run the plan with your own team, bring Rickey in to deliver the first project, or continue with fractional Chief AI Officer leadership.