B1
20 days
AI Operating Model Design
B1 - AI Centre of Excellence Design is the operating model for an AI centre of excellence, with a named owner on every gate it genuinely holds. You hold a post created to decide which AI work ships, and nobody wrote down what you may decide, so the authority stayed where it already sat, and neither you nor the product team finds out until the day it matters. With the AI Centre of Excellence Design module, we build the function around the one decision it genuinely owns: who may request, approve, pause and stop, and whose name sits on each.
Over four to six weeks, I stand that centre up, or take the gate back where one has settled into reporting. You keep the operating model, and a matrix mapping each of those four rights to an owner and a route to a decision.
By the end of the second quarter you can see which way it has gone. You report monthly, you hold a register of everything running, you answer for whatever goes wrong, and you cannot end a single pilot.
That position costs you delivery. Among the organisations Schellman classed as mature, seventy-eight per cent had AI agents in production, against twenty-two per cent of the rest.
The centre that cannot stop anything cannot ship anything either.
A centre holds because it owns a gate somebody has to pass through. One decision, with a name attached, that a business unit genuinely cannot go around.
In the first week, I ask which gate you are willing to hand over, because without one, this is administration.
I was CX Solution Lead and ran the Generative AI practice at EY UK and Ireland, and built it into a three million pound book of business. Inside it, I ran an AI Centre of Enablement, selling everything from two-hour introductions to twenty-four-week builds.
| Phase | Activities |
|---|---|
| Demand | Counting the requests already in flight, where each one arrived, who answered it and how long it waited |
| Decision rights | Who decides what, who is consulted, who is told afterwards, and where a disagreement goes |
| Route | The path a request travels from arrival to approval, pause or stop |
| Economics | Reusable material specified, and cross-charging where the competition for engineering time calls for it |
| Model | The operating model, with a named owner against each part of the centre |
| Standing up | The ninety-day plan, sequenced, with owners |
I start with demand, because a centre designed before anybody counts the requests gets sized for the organisation’s ambition and then buried by its traffic. The count tells you whether to staff the front door with two people or six.
Decision rights come next, and the document recording them should be short. The matrix is real when somebody can point at a live initiative and name who would stop it.
Escalation covers disputes between the centre and a business unit, and that argument is coming. A version settled by seniority in a corridor teaches everybody to route around you next time.
Cross-charging is optional, and I will tell you when the economics do not call for it. Reusable material is what most designers leave until last, and it determines whether you hold a function or a project queue.
Your second use case should cost less than the first, because the evaluation method, prompt patterns, risk register template, and vendor question set already exist. I specify that library, and your people build it within ninety days, so it is the part they carry after I'm gone.
| The problem | What the design settles |
|---|---|
| You hold the AI mandate, and nobody has told you what you are allowed to decide | A decision rights matrix covering request, approval, pause and stop, with a name against each |
| Requests arrive from several directions, and there is no single route in | The route from request to decision, including where disagreements escalate |
| A business unit is close to production, and it is unclear who could pause it | One gate a business unit cannot go around, and the person who holds it |
| Every use case costs roughly what the last one cost | A specification for the reusable material your people build inside the ninety days |
| The centre exists on a slide and holds no decision anybody has to respect | An operating model with named owners, and a ninety-day plan for standing it up |
| A centre has been running for a year and reports on work it cannot stop | The gate it should have held, taken back with a name against it |
| Money has to move between business units, and nobody can prioritise | A cross-charging model where the economics call for one |
I am one person, so standing up a function means your people own it. That is the intent.
Work that needs somebody in the seat for two quarters belongs to Fractional Design Leadership.
This is one of three modules under AI Operating Model Design, which carries the offer and the fee. That page sets the order in which the three run.
If your problem is a mandate with no authority, or a centre reporting on work it cannot stop, this module is for you.
If your problem is that the criteria this centre would enforce do not exist yet, then AI Scale Assessment is for you.