Where AI belongs in your organization, in what order, at what cost — and what to say no to.

The Opportunity Blueprint is a fixed-fee diagnostic engagement that ends with a decision your leadership can fund and your board can defend. Over three to five weeks we interview your leadership and the people actually doing the work, map the processes, build an ROI model on your real numbers, and hand you six named artifacts — including a scored vendor shortlist and a board-ready presentation. Pricing is tiered by organization size, starting at $8,500. DHMEC.AI doesn’t build software and takes no vendor commissions.

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What the Blueprint answers

Four questions, in this order:

Where does AI actually belong here? Not where it could theoretically be applied — where it would relieve a real constraint in your operation.

In what order? Sequencing is most of the value. The right third project done first fails; done third it works, because the first two built the conditions for it.

At what cost, with what return? Built on your hours, your rates, your headcount. Not benchmarks from a company that doesn’t resemble yours.

And what should we say no to? Every engagement produces a “not this” list. It’s usually the part clients quote back to us a year later.

What makes this different from a readiness assessment

Most AI assessments are a questionnaire. Leadership fills it out, a score comes back, and the score reflects what leadership believes is happening.

We interview two groups separately. Leadership tells us the goals. The people doing the work tell us the reality. The distance between those two accounts is where the actual opportunity sits — and where most failed AI projects were doomed before anyone bought anything.

Interviews are conducted with permission and recorded, focused on problems rather than solutions. We’re not asking your staff what AI tools they want. We’re asking what takes too long, what gets done twice, and what everyone works around.

The six artifacts

A serious engagement should leave you with documents that outlive the consultant. You receive:

1. Readiness report — where your organization stands on the dimensions that predict whether an AI effort holds or stalls
2. Opportunity matrix — every candidate use case, scored on impact and feasibility
3. Prioritized 18-month roadmap — sequenced, with owners and dependencies
4. ROI model — built on your real numbers, covering both cost savings and capacity reallocation
5. Vendor shortlist with scoring criteria — including the criteria themselves, so you can re-run the evaluation without us
6. Board-ready presentation deck — the whole case, in the form your board actually reads

What it is not

The Blueprint is not implementation. We don’t build, configure, or deploy anything, and we don’t resell anyone’s software. When the roadmap calls for a vendor or an implementation partner, we help you select and manage them — but we’re never the one holding the contract.

It’s also not a technology audit. We assess process and people. We don’t touch your data.

How it runs

Week 1 — Interviews. Leadership on goals and constraints. End users on how the work actually happens.

Week 2 — Process mapping and the opportunity matrix. Current state documented, candidate opportunities scored on impact and feasibility.

Week 3 — Solution design, vendor scan, and ROI model. What each opportunity would require, who could deliver it, and what it returns.

Week 4 — Validation and delivery. A working session where your leadership pressure-tests the findings before anything is final, then the board-ready presentation.

Extended engagements add a fifth week for organization-wide scope.

Pricing

Tier	Client size	Price	Scope
Essential	Under $1M budget or revenue	$8,500	3 weeks · one department or function · up to 8 interviews
Standard	$1M – $5M	$15,000	4 weeks · two to three functions · up to 15 interviews
Extended	Over $5M or multi-site	$22,000	5 weeks · organization-wide · up to 25 interviews

A $2,500 AI Readiness Briefing is credited in full toward any tier booked within 60 days of the Briefing.

Who this is for

We work with arts and cultural institutions, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations in the Charlotte region and across the Carolinas, typically $250,000 to $5 million in annual budget. We also serve hospitality, wellness, lifestyle, food service, tourism, and property management organizations where the experience is the product.

The Blueprint is the right engagement when:

• Your board or funders have asked for an AI strategy and you need a defensible answer, not a slide
• You know something should change operationally but not which thing, or in what order
• You’re about to select a vendor and nobody internal can evaluate the claims
• A previous AI effort stalled and you need to understand why before spending again
• Growth, a capital campaign, or a new site has pushed your operations past what your current systems carry

Who should start elsewhere

If you haven’t decided whether this is worth pursuing at all, start with the $2,500 AI Readiness Briefing — two weeks, a scorecard, and a 30-day plan, credited in full toward a Blueprint if you continue. If you already have a roadmap and need an independent advisor through selection and rollout, that’s the Standing Seat. And if you need someone to build or configure the software, that’s an implementation partner — we’ll help you choose one, but it isn’t us.

What happens after

The Blueprint ends with a decision, not a relationship obligation. Some clients take the roadmap and execute it internally, and that’s a legitimate outcome — the artifacts are built to be used without us.

For clients who want us in the room through selection and adoption, the Standing Seat is a monthly retainer starting at $1,800. Implementation partners demobilize at go-live, which is exactly when adoption fails in organizations staffed by part-time, seasonal, and volunteer teams. The Standing Seat is the constant across vendors and across years.

Why independence matters here

Most people advising you on AI make money on what you buy. We don’t build software, we don’t resell it, and we take no commissions from any vendor or implementation partner in either direction. That structure is what lets a vendor shortlist mean something — and what lets us tell you when the answer is “wait,” or “you already own this.”

Questions we get