In 90 minutes, we’ll show you where automation would actually pay off in one department, with hours attached to every candidate.
$3,500 · one department · remote or on-site
You’ve heard every week this year that AI and automation are reshaping your industry. You’re under cost pressure, and you can’t hire your way out of it.
So you either do nothing, or you buy a platform and spend the next year looking for something to point it at.
The Discovery Workshop answers one question first: where would this actually pay off here?
1. A 15-minute call. We confirm the department does real manual volume. If it doesn’t, we’ll tell you, and you won’t buy a workshop you don’t need.
2. The 90-minute session. We sit with the people who do the work, not just the people who manage it. Process by process: how often it happens, how long it takes, where the data comes from, who owns it.
3. Your written assessment, within 5 business days. Every candidate placed on our Automation Matrix, with estimated volume, recoverable hours, and a clear call on each one: build it, prove it, fix it first, or leave it with a person.
The matrix scores each process on two things. Value comes from volume: work your team does a thousand times a month, not once a quarter. Readiness comes from clean master data, clear business rules, and someone who owns the process end to end. Where a process lands tells you what to do with it.
Forrester’s study of Microsoft Power Automate customers puts the return from high-impact automation at about 250 hours per affected employee a year. For a five-person finance or HR team, that’s roughly 1,250 hours, close to an hour per person per day.
McKinsey found that collecting and processing data eats up about a third of all workplace time, and that more than 60% of it could be automated.
Those are averages. The workshop replaces them with your number.
Led by Joe Leo, Head of Automation at Narrative Group.
Joe spent six years building the automation program at Loblaw: more than 200 automated solutions across 2,500 locations and 10,000 users, and more than $20 million in capacity freed up. Not one person lost their job because of it.
He also knows what the big consultancies sell. At Loblaw he sat across the table from Accenture and EY, evaluating their pitches. Since then, we’ve run this method across eight finance departments at a national logistics company, again across the table from Accenture. Discovery there found 20 operational bottlenecks; automating five of them as quick wins removed 5,000 hours of manual work a year.
For Opimian, Canada’s membership wine club, we replaced five disconnected systems with a single automation layer and cut annual operating cost from about $350,000 to about $20,000.
Nothing, if you don’t want anything. The assessment is yours.
If you want to go further, the workshop is the first step:
| Step | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Automation Discovery Workshop | One department, 90 minutes, a scored shortlist with hours | $3,500 |
| Automation Strategy & Roadmap | Up to 10 departments, a full report, and a prioritized roadmap tied to your P&L | Fixed fee, from $65,000 |
| Pilot & Implementation | We build the top of the list | Fixed price per project |
| Managed Automation Services | A monthly team that builds, maintains and governs your automations, without you hiring one | From $15,000 a month |
Upgrade to the Strategy & Roadmap within 60 days and the workshop fee is credited.
It’s small enough to say yes to without a committee, and concrete enough to produce real numbers. If the results are worth it, the Strategy & Roadmap covers the rest of the business.
Then you’ll know for $3,500, before you spend ten times that on a platform. A short “leave it alone” list is a real result.
No. We’re platform-agnostic, and we’ll tell you what not to automate as readily as what to automate.
Yes. The things that decide whether you can automate also decide whether you can use AI: data quality, process ownership, governance, maintenance, and whether anyone has tied it to a number. We’ll tell you where AI fits and where it doesn’t.
Either. In the Greater Toronto Area we can be on-site. Everywhere else, the session runs on a video call with a shared screen.
The Automation Readiness Scorecard tells you whether your company is ready to automate. The workshop tells you exactly what to automate, process by process.
Not ready to talk? Take the free 3-minute Automation Readiness Scorecard.