Retail & Consumer Goods
AI Strategy & Readiness
Northfield & Cole
From a readiness assessment to
three systems in production.
Use cases in production
5 weeks
3
Was
0
+3 shipped
23
Use cases scored
3
Shipped in 6 months
5 wks
Assessment
02 · The engagement
Published
01 · Challenge
What was actually broken
Not the symptom, the cause.
Northfield & Cole’s leadership team had approved an AI budget but no roadmap — three competing use cases from three departments, no shared way to compare them, and a board asking for a return-on-investment case before funding any of them.
02 · Approach
How we scoped it
And what we deliberately chose not to build first.
We ran a five-week readiness assessment across the candidate use cases: customer-service deflection, inventory forecasting and a supplier-document processing backlog. Each was scored against a shared effort, risk and payback matrix, so the comparison wasn’t three departments each arguing their own case. The resulting roadmap sequenced all three, starting with the fastest payback.
03 · Architecture
The system, in one diagram
What it connects to, what a person still reviews, where the guardrails sit.
Solution architecture
Strategy
Three departments
23 candidate use cases
Readiness per source
Data & infra audit
Effort · risk · payback
Scoring matrix
Build vs buy per case
Board review
Pass · Top two use cases
Pilot + Scale
Else · With reasons
Deferred list
12-month roadmap with budget bands · reviewed quarterly
The assessment produced a 12-month roadmap with budget bands per use case, plus a build-vs-buy recommendation for each. Northfield & Cole moved directly into Pilot and Scale engagements with the same team on the top two use cases, avoiding a re-scoping gap between phases.
04 · Result
What changed
Measured in production, not in the pilot.
Within six months of the readiness assessment, Northfield & Cole had two use cases live in production — a supplier-document processing pipeline and a customer-service deflection assistant — with the third in build. The shared prioritization matrix also gave the board a consistent way to evaluate the next round of proposals.
Result at a glance
Client
Northfield & Cole
Industry
Retail & Consumer Goods
Service
AI Strategy & Readiness
Time to production
5 weeks
Headline
3
production use cases shipped within 6 months of the assessment
03 · What changed
In the client’s own operating numbers
3
production use cases shipped within 6 months of the assessment
$680K
in first-year savings across the first two use cases
5 weeks
assessment to signed roadmap
+3 shipped
Use cases in production
0
→
3
04 · In their words
Operators, not buyers
The assessment gave us something we didn't have before: a way to compare three departments' pet projects on the same terms. The roadmap that came out of it is still the document our board references when we talk about what's next.
Farrah Lindqvist, Chief Digital Officer, Northfield & Cole
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