How we help
Before your company adds another tool, the board should know where it will pay for itself
The AI Business Center Foundation (AIBC) is a think tank and advisory partner that helps the boards of construction, industrial and technical-services companies adopt artificial intelligence so that it delivers measurable results and builds competitive advantage. An AI audit and strategy answers one question: which processes are worth investing in, and which are not.
AI strategy is no longer an IT department document. It has become the board’s investment plan
Decisions about artificial intelligence are now most often made in a conversation with a vendor: someone demonstrates a tool, someone else signs off the licences, and a quarter later nobody can say what has come of it. An audit reverses the sequence. We start with the company’s processes, costs and risks, and choose the tool last.
The problem we solve
In construction and industrial companies, the most expensive item is not licences but wrong decisions: an implementation in a process nobody has described, a pilot without measurement, a project built on data that cannot be used. Gartner predicted (February 2025) that by the end of 2026 companies will abandon 60% of AI projects not supported by AI-ready data. The audit is designed to catch such projects before they consume the budget.
What we do
- Process review. Together with process owners, we go through repetitive tasks in the office, in production, in logistics, on site and in customer service.
- Assessment on three axes. Each candidate is assessed for value, feasibility and risk, including legal risk.
- Choice of route to AI. We assess which of the three routes fits the data in the process: public tools, enterprise cloud or private instance. Data sovereignty and private AI instance
- Information friction map. We show where work stalls for lack of data, rules or decisions, and who can unblock it.
- Business case. For selected processes we describe the cost, the expected effect as a range* and how it will be measured using data from the company’s systems.
- Action plan. The sequence of implementations, conditions for starting, roles on the company side and a brief for the IT department.
Where the company reports its consumption of energy and materials or its waste, we also check whether the same data can feed AI applications that support circular economy goals. This can be an argument in discussions with a funding institution.
* Values depend on the process; confirmed in the audit.
What stays with the company
- a list of processes ranked by value, feasibility and risk,
- an information friction map with owners,
- a business case for the processes recommended for a pilot,
- an action plan for the coming quarters, with the decisions the board must take,
- a recommendation: implement, organise first, or stop.
Part of the audit follows the method of semantic transformation, that is, organising a company’s names, processes and data so that people, language models and board reports understand them the same way. As a result, the strategy has a shared vocabulary and owners for its measures from the outset.
The first step
The first step is usually the 30-day readiness assessment. If the board needs a broader strategy straight away, we begin with a conversation about scope: the number of departments, sites and processes. The scope and the commercial arrangement depend on these three figures.
Frequently asked questions
How does an AI audit differ from a software vendor's proposal?
A vendor shows what its product can do. An audit starts with the company's processes and ends with a recommendation that may also be “do not implement” or “organise the data first”. The Foundation does not sell licences, so the outcome of the audit does not depend on what we have to offer.
Does the audit require access to the company's systems?
Within the scope agreed with the company. We work from interviews with process owners, a sample of documents and data that the company itself selects, and the system data needed to measure the baseline. The scope of access is approved by the company's security and data protection functions.
Does the audit result include a promise of savings?
Not as a guarantee. We state potential as a range that depends on the process and the starting point, and we confirm it by measuring before and after in a pilot. Every figure in the report is sourced from the company's data or from a described study.
How long does the audit take?
We usually start with the 30-day readiness assessment. A strategy for the whole organisation, covering several departments or sites, is planned after the assessment, because it is the assessment that shows how many processes merit analysis.
Let’s start with an assessment
One process, an owner and a baseline are enough to begin. Let’s talk about the assessment.