This is AI consultancy done the practical way, and every 53d North engagement starts here. In a one-day AI Problem Framing workshop, your team turns a vague mandate to "do something with AI" into one prioritised use case with a clear business case, backed by an engineering check on your data, risk and feasibility.
Most smaller businesses feel pressure to adopt AI without a defined problem to point it at. The usual result is a stack of pilots and chat tools that look busy and change nothing about how the work gets done.
Assess changes the question your team is answering, and it gets a decision made before any money goes on building.
What can AI do for us?
What should AI do to create real value here?
Before the workshop, we ask everyone on your team to write up each AI idea on an AI Idea Canvas. It makes everyone answer the same basic questions: what the idea does, what problem it fixes, which goal it serves and how you'd know it worked.
Ideas that can't fill the canvas usually aren't ready yet. Ideas that can arrive on the day ready to be compared fairly.
Which business goal does this idea support or speed up?
How is this handled today, without AI? Describe the process, the workarounds, the systems and the manual effort.
One sentence. Describe the solution: what does it do?
What isn't working well enough today? What's slow, costly, risky or impossible? How do you know the problem exists?
Success outcome in one or two bullets. What changes if this works? Where will you see it, and how will you know?
Why act now? What has changed that makes this worth doing?
Write the idea as one plain sentence. If it takes a paragraph, it's probably two ideas.
Describe how the work is done today and what's wrong with it. Use evidence, not opinion.
Tie the idea to a goal the business already tracks. If you can't, park it.
Say what success looks like, how you'll measure it, and why now is the moment.
AI suggests and a person decides. Drafts, summaries and recommendations, with someone checking every output.
Lowest risk · fastest to shipAI and people share the work. AI handles defined steps in the process and hands off to people for judgement and exceptions.
Bigger gains · redesigns the workflowAI runs the task end to end. People set the rules, watch the results and step in when something falls outside them.
Highest value · highest bar for testing and governanceMost small and medium businesses get their first return from AI-assisted ideas. We'll help you judge where on that scale each idea really belongs, and what it would take to move it further along.
Every phase ends at a decision gate, so the room keeps moving forward and never has to re-open a debate it has already settled.
Everyone brings their AI Idea Canvases. We put every idea, leadership request and half-started initiative on the wall, then group them into themes so everyone can see the whole picture.
A shared view of everything that's on the table.
We agree the business goals that matter this year and map each idea to a goal or a blocker. Ideas that don't connect get parked, not argued over.
Strategic goals agreed. Off-strategy ideas set aside.
We define the smallest group of customers or staff who share a problem and would adopt first, then rank their problems by how painful and how pressing they are.
Target segment and priority problems agreed.
We map the customer journey, or the internal workflow, step by step to find where AI could remove friction. Some steps need no AI at all, and some shouldn't exist.
Journey mapped and desired outcomes clear.
We test the strongest ideas for desirability, viability and feasibility, then shape the top one or two into a single, fundable story.
One use case agreed and signed off by your decision-maker.
Loud voices don't win. Each idea is scored the same way, and the trade-offs are visible to everyone in the room.
Which idea has the best chance of reaching people and spreading through the business?
Which idea delivers the strongest return for the money and effort it needs?
Which idea is quickest, cheapest and simplest to get into production?
Which idea has the most accessible, best-quality, AI-ready data behind it?
Ideas that fix something that hurts today. People will change how they work to get them.
Ideas that are nice to have. Worth recording, but rarely the place to start.
You bring the knowledge of your business. We bring the method and the engineering judgement.
The person who owns the outcome and the budget, usually an MD, director or department head. They make the call at each gate.
People who know the customers, the operation, the data, compliance and the systems. Expertise matters more than seniority.
We run the day, keep the decisions moving and record the outputs. One of our engineers sits in to test every idea against reality.
A good workshop gets you agreement. We also make sure the use case you've agreed on can actually be built, run and kept compliant.
We review where the data lives, its quality, who owns it and how we'd access it, before anyone commits to a build.
We classify the use case under the EU AI Act and UK rules on automated decisions, and flag the UK GDPR, data protection impact assessment and information security points early, so they shape the design instead of blocking it later.
We look at model options, integration with your existing systems, running costs and what it takes to operate the system day to day.
In those cases, talk to us about going straight to Build.
Your use case points inward or outward, and that sets the route into Build. Either way you get evidence, not opinion, before you scale.
For use cases inside your operation. We map the current workflow, build a working AI agent or tool with your subject-matter experts and put it in front of the staff who will use it.
“Will our people trust it and use it?”
For use cases your customers will touch. We prototype the experience and test it with real customers before committing to a full build.
“Will customers value it enough to change what they do?”
Both routes end with a clear scale, iterate or stop decision, so nothing drifts on as a never-ending pilot.
A one-day, facilitated workshop that turns a vague mandate to "do something with AI" into one prioritised, fundable use case. It's based on Design Sprint Academy's AI Problem Framing method, adapted by 53d North for small and medium enterprises and extended with an engineering assessment.
Your decision-maker, usually an MD, director or department head, plus six to eight people who know your customers, operations, data, compliance and systems. 53d North provides a facilitator and an engineer.
Completed AI Idea Canvases for every idea raised, a signed-off AI Use Case Card, a fuller use case brief, and our engineering view on data readiness, feasibility and compliance risk.
Yes. Every use case is classified under the EU AI Act and checked against UK rules on automated decisions and UK GDPR, so prohibited or high-risk uses are flagged before anything is built.
No production data is needed. We look at where your data lives, who owns it and how good it is, so we can judge whether the use case is realistic.
Our workshop and AI Idea Canvas are based on the AI Problem Framing method developed by Design Sprint Academy, adapted by 53d North for small and medium enterprises and extended with an engineering assessment.