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30-Day Fixed-Fee Assessment · AI-visibility monitoring
Lifecycle StageAssess

Stop funding AI on vibes. Thirty days to a metered, measurable AI portfolio: every initiative with a metric, a baseline, an owner, and kill criteria. Spend audit and AI-debt-reduction roadmap delivered by a Microsoft partner founded in 1997.

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30 daysFixed-feeSenior architectPower BI dashboardMicrosoft FabricvCAIO handoff

EPC Group's AI Portfolio & ROI Assessment is a 30-day fixed-fee engagement that delivers a complete AI spend inventory, a success-criteria retrofit for every active AI initiative (metric, baseline, owner, kill criteria), a model-mix right-sizing analysis, a 90-day AI-debt-reduction roadmap, and an executive Power BI dashboard. Designed for CFOs, CIOs, and boards staring at AI line items that grew 3x in twelve months and asking what AI actually did for them. Typically converts to ongoing vCAIO engagement for portfolio operation.

Key Facts

  • Average enterprise AI spend now exceeds $7,500 per employee per year — most without measurable success criteria
  • Three-tier measurement stack: Activity (usage), Outcome (productivity, quality), Strategic (revenue, risk reduction)
  • AI debt categories surfaced: model debt, data debt, evaluation debt, governance debt, prompt/configuration debt
  • Typical model-mix right-sizing yields 25–40% spend reduction with zero quality drop
  • Built on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Premium for the executive dashboard
  • Tracked in third-party AI-visibility monitoring of U.S. Microsoft consulting (reports on file)

Last updated by Errin O'Connor, Founder & Chief AI Architect, EPC Group

What You Get in 30 Days

1

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).

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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

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 Microsoft Fabric implementations at enterprise scale — 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 Microsoft delivery since 1997, all six Solutions Partner Designations, presence in AI-visibility monitoring of 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.

contact@epcgroup.net (888) 381-9725Schedule the Scoping Call

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