/ Coming Soon
The AI value gap, and why most consultancies can't close it.
Why so much AI spend never reaches the P&L — and why generalist consultancies and one-person specialists both miss it.
Now Booking · Q3 Engagements
Strategy. Implementation.
Value Creation.
Board-level AI strategy, practical governance, and the operators who turn AI into measurable value. For Pharma/Biotech, Life Sciences, and other enterprises from $100MM to $5B — where AI should be moving the P&L, not just the pilot list.
/ 01 The Approach
The AI bottleneck isn't the technology. It's getting it inside your business — strategically, operationally, and profitably.
Principle 01
Strategy without execution is a deck.
Most consultancies leave after the roadmap. We stay, build, and ship. The engagement isn't done until something works in production.
Principle 02
Execution without value is activity.
Shipping AI isn't the goal — moving the P&L is. Every engagement ties to value pools, ROI, and adoption you can measure and defend to the board.
Principle 03
Value without governance is fragile.
Gains that can't be governed don't last. We build the guardrails, risk discipline, and oversight that let the business move with the board's confidence.
02
The Problems We Solve
Sound familiar?
If you're a Board member or CEO, you've heard at least three of these in the last quarter. Most share one root cause: a gap between AI ambition and the operational reality of turning it into value.
/ 01
"The board keeps asking what we're doing about AI."
No coherent answer, no roadmap, and the competitive landscape is moving. The CEO needs a strategy that's specific to the business — not a generic deck.
Strategy & AI Opportunity Assessment
/ 02
"We've spent six months on pilots that never ship."
The slides look great. Nothing's in production. Vendors are circling. The team is exhausted and the CFO is asking pointed questions about ROI.
Implementation & Deployment
/ 03
"We don't have an AI policy and we just got asked for one."
A customer, regulator, or insurer wants documentation. The legal team is improvising. Use is already widespread inside the company — without rules.
Governance, Policy & Risk Framework
/ 04
"Three vendors are pitching us. We can't tell them apart."
Each promises transformation; each has a different price tag and procurement path. You need an independent voice in the room — not another sales pitch.
Vendor Selection & Diligence
/ 05
"We're doing AI diligence on an acquisition target."
PE deal or strategic acquisition. The target claims an AI moat. You have two weeks to assess what's real, what's marketing, and what becomes a Day-1 liability.
M&A & Investment Diligence
/ 06
"Our team doesn't know what they don't know."
Strong leaders, but no one has lived through an AI transformation. Hiring an in-house AI exec is a year-long search. You need someone embedded — now.
Fractional AI Leadership & Coaching
03
What We Do
Three pillars. One firm.
Most engagements span at least two of the three. The advantage of one firm carrying strategy through implementation through value creation is that nothing gets lost in handoff — the people who set the agenda are the people who build the systems and prove the value.
Pillar 01
Strategy
Where AI belongs in your business — and where it doesn't.
When to engageYou're being asked for an AI strategy, an executive briefing, a board memo, or a roadmap that the CFO and CEO will both sign.
A working AI strategy is not a list of use cases. It's an honest map of where AI will create durable value in your business, where it won't, and what to do first. Board-ready, CFO-defensible, and rooted in what your business actually looks like — not a vendor's slide template.
- AI Opportunity AssessmentWorkflow-by-workflow scan of where AI creates leverage, where it creates risk, and where it's a distraction. Scored by impact, feasibility, and time-to-value.
- Executive & Board AdvisoryBriefings, board memos, and quarterly check-ins. A fluent partner in the room when the question is "what about AI?"
- AI Roadmap & Investment Plan12 to 36 months, sequenced. What to build, what to buy, what to wait on. Includes capital plan and capability-build trajectory.
- Vendor & Tool SelectionIndependent diligence on Copilot, Claude, Glean, Writer, Cohere, custom build, and the integrators pitching you. We don't take referral fees.
- M&A & Investment DiligenceFor PE firms, family offices, and corp-dev teams: rapid assessment of an AI claim in a deal. What's real, what's marketing, what's a post-close liability.
Outcome
A signed strategy document the CEO, CFO, and board agree on. Specific enough to act on Monday; durable enough to live for three years.
Pillar 02
Implementation
Working systems in production. Not slides. Not pilots that die.
When to engageYou have a strategy (ours or someone else's) and you need a team that will actually build and deploy. Or you have pilots that aren't reaching production.
Implementation is where most AI work dies. The handoff from strategy to engineering goes wrong; the team doesn't know how to operate LLM systems; the vendor's reference architecture doesn't fit your stack. We embed alongside your team, ship working systems, and transfer capability as we go.
- Production AI AgentsInternal agents for sales ops, finance close, customer ops, knowledge retrieval, document workflows. Built on your data, in your environment.
- System Integration & Data PipelinesConnecting LLMs to your CRM, ERP, ticketing, document stores, and warehouses. With retrieval that actually works on your messy data.
- Workflow AutomationTargeted automation of high-leverage workflows — RFP responses, contract review, invoice processing, customer onboarding, executive reporting.
- Embedded Build TeamsSenior engineers and PMs working alongside your team for 8 to 26 weeks. We sit in your standups, ship in your repos, and leave behind operators who can run the system.
- Capability Transfer & TrainingHands-on training for your internal team so the work outlives the engagement. We don't build dependency; we build operators.
Outcome
A working system in production, with monitoring, fallback paths, and a team inside your company that knows how to operate it.
Pillar 03
Value Creation
Turning AI from cost and experimentation into measurable enterprise value — governed so it lasts.
When to engageYou've invested in AI and need to show the return — value, adoption, productivity, and risk reduction the board can see — and the governance to keep those gains durable.
Value Creation is where the work pays off. We size the opportunity, build the value cases, track ROI and adoption, and put the governance and risk discipline in place so the gains are real, durable, and defensible to the board. Aligned to NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 where it matters; readable by humans where it doesn't.
- Opportunity Sizing & Value CasesWhere AI moves the P&L — growth, productivity, cost, and risk. Quantified value pools and business cases the CFO will defend.
- ROI & Adoption TrackingBaselines, value measures, and adoption metrics so benefits are realized — not just promised. Reported on a cadence the board can read.
- Governance & Risk FrameworkPragmatic policy, controls, and human-in-the-loop design. Aligned to NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 where useful; PHI/PII-aware for regulated work.
- Operating Model & OversightWho owns AI, how decisions get made, and how the board oversees strategy, risk, and value over time.
- Benefits RealizationClosing the loop from roadmap to results — so the value committed in the strategy actually shows up in the business.
Outcome
A value scorecard and governance package: quantified benefits, adoption metrics, risk controls, and a board reporting cadence — proof the AI investment is paying off.
04
What's at Stake
Why companies hire us.
Boards and CEOs don't need another deck — they need AI that moves the business. Pickett Strategy Group pairs board-level strategy with hands-on execution, so the agenda becomes measurable enterprise value.
Who We Serve
$100MM–$5B
Boards, CEOs, and PE-backed companies where AI can materially move enterprise value.
First Insight
4 weeks
From kickoff to a board-ready strategy with prioritized roadmap. Pace is its own form of clarity.
In Production
90 days
Typical timeline from assessment to first working AI system in your environment. Real users, real workflows.
Engagement Posture
One firm
Strategy, implementation, and value creation from the same team. No handoffs. No subcontractors hiding behind your logo.
05
How We Work
Three phases. One engagement.
Every engagement follows the same arc, scaled up or down by scope. Discover first — fast — because most of the cost of bad AI work is doing the wrong work well. Then build. Then prove and govern the value, with the board kept in view.
Discover
Interviews with the executive team, workflow mapping, data & system audit, opportunity scoring, and a board-ready strategy document. Output is a roadmap you can defend to the CFO.
- // Executive interviews (CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, functional leads)
- // Workflow & data inventory across departments
- // Vendor & tech landscape mapping
- // Opportunity scoring (impact × feasibility × time-to-value)
- // Governance & risk baseline
- // Board-ready strategy & roadmap document
Deploy
Build the first two or three production systems. Embedded engineers, your data, your environment. Integrations, monitoring, fallback paths, and the human-in-the-loop controls designed in from day one.
- // Solution architecture & vendor selection
- // Production build (agents, retrieval, integrations)
- // Connection to your CRM / ERP / document systems
- // Acceptable-use policy & risk controls in place
- // User training & rollout to first cohort
- // Capability transfer to your internal team
Govern & Operate
After Deploy, most clients keep us on a fractional basis — quarterly governance reports, expansion to new workflows, ongoing executive advisory, and a phone number to call when something changes in the landscape.
- // Quarterly governance review & board reporting
- // Model & vendor monitoring
- // Expansion to next-priority workflows
- // Ongoing executive & board advisory
- // Crisis response & incident review
- // Strategic refresh every 12 – 18 months
06
What We Build
Representative engagements.
Enterprise AI rarely looks like the demos. It looks like making the finance close run two days faster, getting an RFP out the door without burning a weekend, or letting customer ops handle 2× the volume with the same headcount.
/ Finance & Operations01
Close Acceleration
Agent + retrieval system that drafts variance commentary, reconciles flagged accounts, and produces the first cut of the monthly close package — reviewed and signed by the controller, not replaced.
NetSuite / SAPRetrievalHuman Review
/ Sales & Revenue02
RFP & Proposal Engine
Internal agent that drafts proposal responses from your past wins, technical docs, and pricing playbooks. The sales team edits and approves; nothing leaves without a human signoff.
SalesforceDoc StoresApproval Workflow
/ Customer Operations03
Support Triage
First-pass ticket classification, draft response, and routing — with confidence scoring that decides what gets auto-sent, what gets reviewed, and what gets escalated.
Zendesk / HubSpotConfidence RoutingQA Loop
/ Legal & Risk04
Contract Review
Redline assistance for MSAs, NDAs, and vendor agreements against your playbook. Flags deviations, suggests fallback language, and never auto-signs anything.
DocuSign / IroncladPlaybook RAGAudit Log
/ Knowledge & Research05
Executive Brief
An always-on briefing agent for the CEO and their direct reports. Pulls from internal data, customer signals, and the market — surfaces what's worth their attention this week.
Data WarehouseSlack / EmailDaily Digest
/ Governance & Compliance06
AI Policy Package
Acceptable-use policy, risk register, vendor inventory, audit log requirements, and a board-ready quarterly governance report. Designed to ship, not sit in SharePoint.
NIST AI RMFISO/IEC 42001Board Reporting
07
Why Pickett Strategy Group
Straight talk.
Six things that separate Pickett Strategy Group from the consultancies and the resellers.
/ 01 · No handoffs
Strategy and execution from the same people.
The senior person who wrote your roadmap is the senior person on the build. Nothing gets lost in translation because there's no translation.
/ 02 · No vendor fees
We don't take referral commissions.
Vendor recommendations are based on fit, not kickbacks. If you ask us "Copilot or Claude?", you get an answer based on your stack — not our P&L.
/ 03 · No subcontractors
The people in the room are the firm.
No farming out the build to a partner network. The team you meet in week one is the team in week sixteen.
/ 04 · No magic words
If we don't know, we say so.
AI moves fast. Some questions don't have answers yet. We'll tell you what's known, what's contested, and what's marketing.
/ 05 · No 200-slide decks
We measure ourselves in shipped systems.
Strategy documents are short and read like writing. Build deliverables are working software. Governance is a thing your team can use.
/ 06 · No lock-in
We build to leave behind.
Capability transfer is a deliverable, not a marketing line. Most clients keep us on a small fractional basis after; none are forced to.
08
About
Founder & principal.
Pickett Strategy Group is founder-led by Larry Pickett. Every engagement runs through him; the team scales around him, not in front of him.
Three decades pairing board-level strategy with hands-on transformation.
Larry founded Pickett Strategy Group to do one thing well: help Boards, CEOs, and PE-backed companies turn AI from a board topic into measurable enterprise value. The firm exists because the gap between AI strategy and AI execution is where most value is lost — and where most consultancies stop.
The work is rooted in a simple operating belief: strategy without execution is theater, execution without value is activity, and value without governance is fragile. A useful advisor carries all three. Pickett Strategy Group is built around that proposition.
Engagements span the U.S. and serve Boards, CEOs, PE firms, and portfolio companies — with deep focus in Pharma/Biotech and Life Sciences, and selected work across other data-driven sectors. Before founding the firm, Larry served as a Chief Information & Digital Officer and multi-time CIO, and co-founded and led a Data Science / AI company serving pharmaceutical clients to a successful exit.
Focus
Pharma · Life Sciences
$100MM – $5B revenue
Based
North Carolina
U.S. nationwide
Practice Areas
Strategy · Implement · Value
Under one roof
Frameworks
NIST · ISO 42001
Aligned where it matters
09
Field Notes
Signal from the frontier.
Short essays on what's actually working in enterprise AI, what isn't, and what the next quarter holds. Written for executives, not engineers.
/ Coming Soon
Pilots that never ship: a diagnosis.
Six reasons AI pilots die at the production threshold — and the operating habits that prevent it. None of them are technical.
/ Coming Soon
A board-ready AI governance package in 90 days.
What "good enough" governance actually looks like for a $400M company — and what NIST AI RMF lets you skip if you're not a regulated industry.
/ Coming Soon
AI in M&A diligence: what's real, what's marketing.
A field guide for PE and corp-dev teams assessing AI claims in deal targets. The four questions that separate durable moat from demo magic.
10
FAQ
Common questions.
The questions that come up on the first call, answered plainly. If yours isn't here, ask it — the email and phone are at the bottom.
We do execution. Large consultancies are excellent at strategy and large-program management, but most subcontract or hand off implementation. Pickett Strategy Group does both — the same senior people who write your strategy build the systems and design the governance. For a enterprise company, that integration is the value.
A solo consultant can write a great strategy, but cannot embed an engineering team to build production systems. Pickett Strategy Group carries both. We're sized for the enterprise — small enough to be senior on every engagement, large enough to ship working software.
Engagement pricing depends on scope. A 4-week Discover phase is a fixed-fee assessment. A typical Deploy phase runs 8 to 16 weeks at a project rate based on team size and integration complexity. Ongoing Govern & Operate work is fractional retainer. We size to the business and the outcome — never billable hours; never bait-and-switch on team seniority. Specifics come on the first call.
Occasionally — typically when a smaller company is venture-backed or has unusual complexity. Below $100MM in revenue, the ROI math on a senior advisory + build engagement gets harder. We'll tell you honestly on the first call whether the scope makes sense.
All of the major ones — Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot — plus integrators like Glean, Writer, and Cohere, and the relevant infrastructure (vector stores, orchestration frameworks, evaluation tools). We don't take referral fees from any of them. Tool selection is driven by your stack and use case, not our P&L.
Yes, with care. We're HIPAA-aware, SOC2-aware, and familiar with the EU AI Act for companies with European exposure. Regulated engagements take longer because governance work runs alongside the build from day one — which is the right way to do it.
30 minutes. You describe the situation; we ask sharp questions; you leave with a candid assessment of whether Pickett Strategy Group is the right fit. If we're not, we'll often suggest who is. No pressure, no follow-up sequence, no "nurture campaign."
Yes. About a third of engagements start with a single pillar — typically Strategy (board needs an answer) or Governance (a customer or regulator is asking). Many expand into the full arc once the value is clear; some don't, and that's fine.
Let's talk.
Tell us where you are. A 20-minute executive call will tell you whether an AI Readiness Assessment is the right next step — and if we're not the right fit, we'll usually know who is.