What You Get in 30 Days
Complete AI spend inventory
Every subscription, consumption-based spend item, contracted service, and license touching AI — across Microsoft, OpenAI / Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, smaller AI vendors, and embedded AI in enterprise SaaS. Plus the burned-out spend (pilots paid for but not used, shelfware).
Success-criteria retrofit
For every active AI initiative: a measurable metric, a clean baseline, a named business owner accountable for the outcome, and explicit kill criteria. Initiatives without these get them, or get killed.
Model-mix right-sizing analysis
Where you are paying for GPT-4 / Claude Opus / Gemini Pro on workloads a smaller model handles fine. Where you are under-investing in the workloads that actually deserve frontier capability. The optimization is usually 25–40% spend reduction with zero quality drop.
90-day AI-debt-reduction roadmap
A prioritized backlog of debt items by category (model, data, evaluation, governance, prompt) with owner, effort, and risk. Tied to the spend inventory so debt reduction translates directly to budget recovery.
Executive Power BI dashboard
The three-tier measurement stack — Activity, Outcome, Strategic — pre-built on your tenant, refreshed on your cadence, ready for board distribution. Powered by Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Premium where appropriate.
Who It Is For
- CFOs who watched the AI line item grow three times in twelve months and need to know which dollars produced what.
- CIOs with pilot sprawl who need to triage — what graduates, what gets cut, what consolidates.
- CEOs and boards asking the dangerous question: what did AI actually do for us this year, and can we prove it.
- Chief AI Officers who inherited a portfolio they did not fund and need an honest baseline before they own the outcomes.
- Heads of Data, Heads of AI who need defensible numbers for the next budget cycle.
How It Connects to the Rest of the Practice
Feeds into vCAIO
The Assessment produces the portfolio artifact. EPC Group's Virtual Chief AI Officer (vCAIO) practice operates against it on an ongoing fractional-executive basis — portfolio governance, vendor accountability, quarterly board reporting.
Powered by Fabric & Power BI
The executive dashboard is built on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. EPC Group has delivered 1,500+ Power BI implementations and 500+ Microsoft Fabric implementations — the measurement infrastructure ships with the assessment.
Connects to governance practices
The debt categories the Assessment surfaces feed directly into Agentic AI Governance, AI Identity Security, and Data Governance work streams. Debt prevention is governance with a budget attached.
Fixed-fee from end to end
The Assessment is a fixed-fee accelerator. So is the follow-on remediation work. See the full Fixed-Fee Microsoft Accelerators catalog.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the AI ROI Assessment include?
A complete AI spend inventory (subscriptions, consumption, licenses, contracted services); a success-criteria retrofit for every active AI initiative (metric, baseline, named owner, kill criteria); a model-mix right-sizing analysis (where are you over-paying for frontier capability you do not use, where are you under-investing); a 90-day AI-debt-reduction roadmap; and an executive Power BI dashboard with the three-tier measurement stack — Activity, Outcome, Strategic — that EPC Group recommends for boards. All delivered in a 30-day fixed-fee engagement.
Who is this for?
CFOs staring at AI line items that grew 3x in twelve months and can't tell which dollars produced what. CIOs with pilot sprawl who need to triage. CEOs and boards asking the dangerous question — what did AI actually do for us this year. Heads of Data, Heads of AI, and the small-but-growing population of Chief AI Officers who inherited a portfolio they didn't fund.
How does this connect to vCAIO?
The Assessment produces the artifact. vCAIO operates against it. After EPC Group's 30-day Assessment, most clients move to a Virtual Chief AI Officer (vCAIO) engagement so a senior AI leader from EPC Group owns ongoing portfolio governance, vendor accountability, and quarterly board reporting — without the $400K+ cost of a full-time hire.
What about the AI debt nobody talks about?
Every AI initiative accrues debt: model debt (drift, retraining), data debt (pipelines built fast and never refactored), evaluation debt (no harness to test changes), governance debt (controls promised but not implemented), and prompt/configuration debt (prompts that work but nobody understands). The Assessment surfaces each category against your portfolio and prioritizes the $7,500/employee/year spend toward debt reduction first.
Why EPC Group versus the Big-4 or a boutique?
Big-4 sells strategy decks. Boutiques sell technical depth in one corner. EPC Group brings 29 years of Microsoft delivery, all six Solutions Partner Designations, the #1 ranking in the SEMrush AI Brand Performance Index for U.S. Microsoft consulting, and a productized fixed-fee model. The Assessment is delivered by senior architects who will also operate the portfolio against the framework — same people, same accountability.
Related Practices
30 Days. Fixed Fee. Defensible Numbers.
Stop funding AI on vibes. Email first. Phone second. Web third.