A Composite Engagement Walkthrough
What a Switch Engagement Actually Looks Like
The work, the people, the conversations, and the outcomes — drawn from the pattern of how Switch engagements unfold with mid-market organizations navigating AI adoption.
A note on this document: What follows is not a fictional case study. It is a composite of what actually happens when mid-market organizations work with Switch on an AI initiative. The details are representative. The challenges are real.
The Scenario
A mid-market firm. A vendor contract. A stall.
A regional professional services firm — about 280 employees, multiple practice areas, one IT director and no dedicated technology leadership above that — has been told by its board to develop an AI strategy. The CEO signed a vendor agreement six months ago for an AI-powered workflow automation platform. Implementation was scheduled to begin in Q1.
It’s now Q2. Nothing has started. The IT director is ready. The vendors are ready. But the CEO has questions he can’t quite articulate. The HR director has heard the word “automation” and is fielding anxious hallway conversations. Two of the five practice leads are enthusiastic. Two are skeptical. One hasn’t said anything.
The board is asking for a progress update in six weeks.
Why nothing has started: There is no alignment problem with the technology. The platform is sound, the vendor is competent, and the IT director has a credible roadmap. The stall is organizational. Leadership hasn’t agreed on what they’re actually trying to accomplish. The workforce hasn’t been told anything. And no one has answered the question that’s quietly blocking everything: what happens to the people whose work gets automated?
The Organization at the Start
| Role | Stake in This Initiative |
|---|---|
| CEO | Signed the vendor contract. Believes AI is necessary. Hasn’t communicated why to anyone else. Getting questions from the board he doesn’t have answers to. |
| COO | Operationally focused. Wants to know what this means for capacity and headcount. Has not been included in technology conversations. |
| HR Director | Aware something is coming. Has heard “automation” and “efficiency” but nothing concrete. Is fielding anxiety from staff without anything to say. |
| IT Director | Has the technology roadmap. Competent. Not resourced or positioned to address the human dimensions. Frustrated by the stall. |
| Practice Leads (5) | Range from excited to skeptical to silent. None have been told what workflows are in scope or what their teams should expect. |
| Front-line Staff | Doing their jobs. Some experimenting with AI tools on their own. Others waiting for something bad to happen. |
The Switch Engagement
A full engagement runs 16–20 weeks.
A complete Switch engagement on an initiative like this involves a combination of offerings sequenced to address human challenges in the order they need to be addressed. Here is how it unfolds.
| Weeks 1–3 | Weeks 4–5 | Week 6 | Weeks 7–16 | Month 3+ |
| 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 |
| AI Readiness & Culture Assessment |
Innovation Unlocking for AI Strategy |
Leadership Alignment |
AI Adoption Workshop Series |
Ongoing Advisory |
| $4,500–$6,500 | $8,000–$12,000 | $10,000–$15,000 | $12,000–$18,000 | $4–6K/mo |
AI Readiness & Culture Assessment
Weeks 1–3 | $4,500–$6,500 | Before anything else is decided
What this is
Before Switch recommends anything — before a workshop is designed, before a facilitation agenda is set — we need to understand what’s actually happening inside the organization. Not the official story. The real one.
The readiness assessment is a structured discovery process: 1:1 interviews, small group conversations, and active listening. Switch talks to people across the organization, asks questions about their work and their worries, and listens for what isn’t being said.
Who’s in the room
- The CEO — one 60-minute conversation. We’re listening for what they believe about AI, what they’re afraid of, and what they haven’t been willing to say out loud.
- COO and HR Director — separately. We want to understand how the human dimensions are being thought about at the leadership level.
- IT Director — to understand the technology roadmap and where they see the organizational friction.
- Practice leads or department heads — usually in pairs. We’re listening for how they describe the initiative to their teams.
- Front-line staff — 6–10 people in small groups of 2–3. Often the most important conversations.
What actually comes up
“People think this means layoffs.” No one has said it out loud, but it’s the dominant assumption. Three front-line staff mentioned it unprompted. The CEO has no idea this is the frame people are working from.
“The practice leads have completely different mental models.” One thinks AI is going to automate client intake. One thinks it’s about internal reporting. One thought it was an IT infrastructure project. They’ve never been in a room together talking about it.
“There’s a shadow system.” Two employees in operations have been using an AI tool on their own for three months. No one officially knows. This is both an opportunity (proof of concept) and a governance signal (no one was watching).
“One practice lead is going to resist regardless.” Her team has the most to gain from automation, but she’s been passed over for a technology decision before. The CEO didn’t know this was a factor.
The deliverable
A written AI Readiness Report delivered to the CEO and leadership team: where the organization actually is (not where leadership thinks it is), specific resistance patterns and fear sources, what leadership needs to do differently before implementation begins, and a prioritized set of recommendations for the human change management work required alongside the rollout.
This report becomes the foundation for everything that follows. It also, almost always, changes the CEO’s understanding of what they’re dealing with.
Without the assessment: Implementation begins on schedule, hits immediate cultural resistance, stalls, and generates organizational friction that can take months to repair — and costs multiples of what this engagement costs. With it: leadership starts with a clear-eyed picture of what they’re working with, and a specific plan for the human work that must happen alongside the technology rollout.
Innovation Unlocking for AI Strategy
Weeks 4–5 | $8,000–$12,000 | Before vendor commitments deepen
What this is
Most organizations arrive at AI adoption through vendor-led conversations: a vendor shows a demo, proposes a use case, and the organization evaluates whether to buy. The problem is that by the time the evaluation begins, the organization has already accepted the vendor’s framing of the problem.
Innovation Unlocking inverts this. Before the organization goes deeper with its vendor, Switch facilitates a session with a cross-functional team to answer a single question from the inside: where does AI actually create value for us — in our work, with our people, for our clients?
The framework is desirability (what do our people actually need?), feasibility (what’s realistic given our capacity and culture?), and viability (what creates lasting value?). The team surfaces and prioritizes their own AI use cases — not the vendor’s.
Who’s in the room
A cross-functional working group of 6–8 people. Deliberately not just leadership — this room needs people who know what the work actually looks like day to day: one practice lead, the IT Director as a technical reality check, two or three front-line employees, HR if workforce implications are significant, and someone from finance or operations who knows where inefficiency actually lives.
The CEO and COO do not attend this session. Their presence changes the dynamics in ways that suppress candor.
What actually happens in the room
The session runs four to five hours and moves through three phases:
- Workflow mapping: The group surfaces the actual workflows in scope — not official process diagrams, but what the work really looks like. Where do people spend time on things that feel repetitive or low-value? Where does judgment matter most?
- Judgment point identification: For each workflow, the group identifies where human judgment is essential and where it’s being applied to tasks that don’t require it. Often the first time anyone in the organization has looked at their work this way.
- Use case development and prioritization: The group generates AI use case candidates — rough, honest, and specific — and works through the desirability/feasibility/viability filter. By end of day, they have a prioritized shortlist of 3–5 use cases they co-created and own.
What actually comes up
The vendor’s lead use case is third on the list. The team’s top priority is something the vendor never mentioned — a client communication workflow that consumes hours per week across every practice. The vendor’s platform can address it, but it wasn’t in scope. Now it will be.
Two proposed use cases get taken off the list. Both involved judgment calls the group agreed shouldn’t be delegated. The team made these decisions themselves, with clarity. They’ll be able to defend them.
The resistance shifts. The skeptical practice lead came in ready to push back. By mid-afternoon she’s leading a conversation about a workflow pain point she’s wanted addressed for two years. She doesn’t know it yet, but she became an advocate in that room.
The deliverable
A written use case prioritization document: the 3–5 AI opportunities the team identified, ranked by the desirability/feasibility/viability framework, with a brief rationale for each decision. This becomes the organization’s internal position going into deeper vendor conversations — and the foundation for what the leadership alignment session addresses next.
Leadership Alignment Facilitation
Week 6 | $10,000–$15,000 | Before implementation begins
What this is
The readiness assessment has surfaced what the organization is actually dealing with. The innovation session has produced a use case priority list the team co-owns. Now the leadership team needs to get aligned — not on the technology, but on the organizational questions that will determine whether this initiative succeeds.
This is a custom-designed facilitation session for senior leadership only. It is not a strategy workshop or a planning exercise. It is a structured conversation about the inflection point the organization is at — and a set of decisions that need to be made before implementation goes any further.
Who’s in the room
The leadership team only. In this engagement: CEO, COO, HR Director, IT Director. Switch facilitates. The room size matters — this session is designed to surface disagreement, not avoid it. Larger groups create the conditions for performance rather than candor.
The agenda — built around five questions
Switch builds the agenda around the specific questions the readiness assessment revealed haven’t been answered:
- What are we actually trying to accomplish? (Not “AI strategy” — what specific outcomes are we committing to, by when?)
- Who owns AI decisions in this organization — including when something goes wrong?
- What are the workforce implications we’re willing to commit to addressing — and what are we not willing to say yet?
- What do we tell our people, and when? Who delivers it?
- What does success look like at 90 days, and who is accountable for each dimension?
What actually happens in the room
The first question takes 90 minutes. This is normal. The CEO has one answer. The COO has a different one. The HR Director has been operating on a third assumption entirely. The IT Director thought everyone already agreed. This disagreement was always there. It was just invisible because no one had been in a room asking the question directly.
The workforce question is the hardest. There are things being considered that they don’t want to commit to saying publicly yet. Switch doesn’t force the answer — but we make sure the question is on the table and that the team is conscious of what they’re choosing not to say, and what that choice costs them in trust.
Accountability gets real. There is a moment in almost every session where someone has to say out loud: “I own this.” It’s often uncomfortable. It’s always necessary. The CEO walks out with a coherent answer for the board. The COO walks out with commitments she didn’t walk in with.
The deliverable
A written Leadership Alignment Summary: the five questions with agreed answers, accountability assignments, and a first draft of the internal communication plan. Not a polished strategy document — a working agreement the leadership team can actually hold each other to. For the first time since the vendor contract was signed, the leadership team knows what they’re doing and why.
AI Adoption Workshop Series
Weeks 7–16 | $12,000–$18,000 | Three to four sessions over 60–90 days
What this is
The adoption workshops are where the human change work moves from the leadership team to the broader organization. These are facilitated working sessions — not training, not presentations — designed to take leadership teams or cross-functional groups through the specific challenges that arise when an organization is in the middle of an AI transition. Typically 3–4 sessions spaced 3–4 weeks apart.
Session 1: Role Identity and the Sources of Resistance
Weeks 7–8 | Half day | Cross-functional group of 12–16
The work: People’s relationship to their work is not primarily about efficiency — it’s about identity. When AI starts handling tasks someone has been doing for years, the emotional response is not logical. This session gives people a framework for what they’re actually experiencing and creates the conditions for honest conversation about it. Participants map the dimensions of their current role, surface their concerns in small groups, and name the specific resistance patterns in this organization.
Someone says out loud what everyone has been thinking but no one has said. This is the moment the conversation in the organization actually changes.
Session 2: Deciding What to Automate — And What to Keep Human
Weeks 10–11 | Full day | Practice leads and operational managers
The work: Using the use case list from the Innovation Unlocking session, this group does the detailed decision-making that determines how implementation will actually go. For each proposed AI workflow: what judgment is required? What happens when the AI gets it wrong? Who decides? How do we know it’s working? The group also does a first pass at governance: who owns each AI-assisted process, and what does “owning it” actually mean?
The group discovers that two of the top use cases require more internal process clarity before they can be automated. Not a failure — this is the work catching something the technology roadmap would have missed.
Session 3: Communicating Change — What We Say and When
Week 13 | Half day | Leadership team plus anyone who manages people
The work: The anxiety in the organization about AI is largely a communication problem. People fill in what they don’t know with what they fear. This session builds the communication framework and gives managers the tools and language to lead the conversation in their teams — including roleplay and scenario work for the hardest questions they’ll face.
The CEO’s draft message sounds exactly like the vendor’s pitch deck. The group rewrites it together. The version that emerges sounds like the organization. That’s the one that lands.
Session 4: Course Correction and Momentum Check
Week 16 | Half day | Full leadership team
The work: By week 16, implementation is underway. Something has not gone according to plan. This session is not a postmortem — it’s a calibration. The leadership team reviews what they committed to, what’s actually happening, and what needs to be adjusted. Switch brings observations from the ongoing advisory engagement about what’s being felt in the organization that isn’t in the status reports.
This session often surfaces that one of the original commitments needs to be renegotiated — not because the leadership team failed, but because something real changed. The ability to renegotiate consciously rather than silently is one of the things Switch creates.
Ongoing Human-Side Advisory
Month 3 onward | $4,000–$6,000 / month | The persistent human lens
What this is
For organizations in longer AI transformations, the human challenges don’t resolve on a workshop schedule. New signals emerge. The technology roadmap evolves. People respond in ways no one predicted. The Ongoing Advisory retainer keeps Switch in the engagement as a standing thinking partner — present where the human dimensions are most visible.
What it actually looks like
- Monthly leadership check-in — not a status report, a real conversation about what Switch is observing and what the leadership team is feeling
- Occasional attendance at key meetings — as an observer, listening for signals the technology team isn’t resourced to hear
- Periodic pulse conversations with front-line staff — informal, voluntary, confidential — to maintain a ground-level view of the organization’s actual state
- On-demand advisory access for the CEO or HR Director when something comes up: a difficult conversation, an unexpected pocket of resistance, a communication decision that needs a second opinion
What Switch sees that the technology team doesn’t
Month 4: One practice lead who was an advocate in month 2 has gone quiet. Switch notices this in a team meeting and flags it to the COO. A 30-minute conversation surfaces a specific concern about how client relationships are being managed by the new AI workflow. The concern is valid. The workflow gets a small adjustment. The advocate comes back.
Month 5: The IT Director’s status reports say adoption is at 70% and trending up. The front-line pulse conversations tell a different story: people are using the tool but not trusting it. They’re running parallel manual processes “just in case.” The metric looks right. The behavior is wrong. Switch brings this to the leadership team before it becomes a habit the organization can’t break.
Month 6: The vendor proposes expanding the scope of the AI implementation to a new practice area. The CEO is inclined to say yes. Switch notes that the new practice area is the one led by the manager identified in the readiness assessment as likely to resist. The expansion conversation needs to happen differently than the initial rollout did. Switch designs the approach. The expansion gets off to a better start.
The Outcomes
What the Organization Looks Like at Week 20
The vendor implementation is underway. Two of the five prioritized use cases are live. The third is in testing. The organization is considerably further along in the ways that matter, and it avoided the stall that was weeks away when the engagement started.
| What changed | What it looks like now |
|---|---|
| Leadership alignment | The CEO, COO, HR Director, and IT Director have a shared definition of what success means and who owns what. This didn’t exist at week 1. |
| Workforce anxiety | Staff still have questions — that’s normal — but the dominant emotion shifted from fear to cautious engagement. The communication framework is in place and managers are using it. |
| Use case ownership | The top-priority AI workflows were identified by the people who do the work, not by the vendor. Adoption is driven by internal motivation, not external mandate. |
| Governance | There’s a clear accountability structure for AI decisions: who owns each automated process, what happens when it fails, who the human backstop is. Functional, if not perfect. |
| The resistant practice lead | Is now the internal champion for one of the use cases from the Innovation Unlocking session. She frames it as “finally fixing the client communication problem.” That’s the right frame. |
| The shadow system | The two employees quietly using AI tools are now officially part of the implementation team. Their experience became an asset instead of a liability. |
The board update happened at week 8 — two weeks ahead of schedule. The CEO walked in with a clear answer to the question he couldn’t articulate before: what are we trying to accomplish, what’s the plan, and who owns it. That was not a small thing.
Investment Summary
What a full engagement costs.
| Offering | Investment Range |
|---|---|
| 01 AI Readiness & Culture Assessment | $4,500 – $6,500 |
| 02 AI Adoption Workshop Series | $12,000 – $18,000 |
| 03 Innovation Unlocking for AI Strategy | $8,000 – $12,000 |
| 04 Leadership Alignment Facilitation | $10,000 – $15,000 |
| 05 Ongoing Advisory (3 months) | $12,000 – $18,000 |
| Full engagement total (approx.) | $46,500 – $69,500 over 20 weeks |
Engagements can begin with a single offering — particularly the Readiness Assessment, which is a natural starting point. Many clients enter through the Workshop Series and add the Advisory retainer as the initiative matures.
The ROI question: The cost of a Switch engagement is measured against the cost of the implementation failing, stalling, or producing resistance that takes 6–12 months to repair. In the scenario above, the implementation was already 90 days stalled before Switch entered. The recovery cost of that stall — in leadership time, vendor fees, and delayed value realization — was already significant. The Switch engagement cost less than the stall did.
What you're buying.
You’re not buying facilitation hours or a readiness report or a workshop series. You’re buying the organizational capacity to make an AI initiative actually work — for the people involved, not just on the technology side.
You’re buying a partner who attends different meetings, talks to different people, and sees different things than your technology team does. Who brings those things into the room at the right moment, in the right way. Who knows the difference between resistance that needs to be addressed and resistance that needs to be heard.
The technology will work or it won’t — that’s your vendor’s job. Making sure the humans around it are ready, aligned, and capable of owning what they’ve built: that’s ours.
switchinnovationlab.com | info@switchinnovationlab.com | 440.808.9843