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Black Mountain AI

Strategy and Discovery

We help you work out what to do with AI, and why.

We map your landscape, find the use cases worth pursuing and build a roadmap your executive will fund.

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The service

We turn AI ambition into a plan you can defend and fund.

An AI strategy is a statement about your mission, your risk appetite, your workforce and the trust people place in you. The technology comes second. We work alongside your executive to make those choices explicit and produce a roadmap your board or your investment committee will back. At the Department of Home Affairs this produced an AI strategy and a Data and AI Governance Framework that the Secretary endorsed.

Services

Here is what strategy and discovery work involves.

  • We assess your AI maturity against recognised benchmarks.
  • We scan your current systems, use cases and exposure.
  • We identify candidate use cases and prioritise them.
  • We build the strategy on the Data, Trust, Tools and People pillars.
  • We sequence a multi-year roadmap against your investment cycle.
  • We run AI literacy sessions for executives and staff.

Why it works

Here is why we approach strategy and discovery this way.

  1. Most AI failures are strategy failures, because the wrong use cases were chosen in the wrong order.

  2. A weak AI strategy creates public interest harm, so the stakes are higher than a wasted budget.

  3. We write strategies that survive contact with procurement, legal, cyber and audit, because we have watched strategies that did not.

  4. In government we tie every strategy to the APS AI Plan and the whole-of-government AI Policy, and elsewhere we tie it to the obligations your board and your regulator hold you to.

By stage

We scope strategy and discovery to where you actually are.

Exploring

You are aware of AI but have no strategy yet.

  • We scan your landscape.
  • We brief your executive.
Developing

Your strategy is forming and the first use cases are running.

  • We write the full AI strategy.
  • We map and prioritise use cases.
  • We sequence the multi-year roadmap.
Scaling

AI is running and you are ready to expand and govern it.

  • We refresh the strategy.
  • We measure benefits realisation.
  • We build the reinvestment case.

Evidence

This is our strategy and discovery work on real engagements.

GovernmentDepartment of Home Affairs · Australian Border Force

A whole-of-department AI Strategy, built on four pillars

A department operating at national scale needed an AI strategy that could satisfy its executive, its assurance functions and the public interest at once. We delivered a four-pillar strategy covering 2026 to 2029, linked end to end from mission risk through to costed milestones with named owners.

We advanced all four pillars in parallel
4 pillarsWe advanced all four pillars in parallel
We scoped, costed and assigned each milestone
18We scoped, costed and assigned each milestone
The roadmap sequences the investment
2026 to 2029The roadmap sequences the investment
Read case study

Other services

Governance

We help you use AI without putting trust at risk.

Delivery

We build the systems, then hand them to your team.

Education and Capability

We get your people leading the work, not waiting on us.

Contact

Tell us what you are trying to do and we will tell you whether AI helps.

If AI is the wrong tool for your problem we will say so, and we will explain why.

Talk to usSee our work