The brief
Produce a board-ready twelve-month AI adoption plan for your own organisation β or, if you would rather not work with internal material, for Vantis Diagnostics, whose case file is below.
The capstone is deliberately assembled rather than written from scratch. If you completed the module exercises, you already hold every component. If you skipped them, this is where that becomes apparent, and the honest response is to go back rather than to write around the gaps.
Target length: eight to twelve pages. Shorter is better than padded; a board reads the first page and the numbers.
| Section | Source | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Situation and exposure | Module 8 advantage thesis, Module 2 evidence ladder | 1 page |
| 2. Labelled portfolio and no-list | Module 3 | 1β2 pages |
| 3. Target architecture | Module 4 integration map | 1 page |
| 4. Flagship workflow design | Module 5 specification, with gates and failure paths | 2 pages |
| 5. Governance baseline | Module 6 control map, with named owners | 1β2 pages |
| 6. Vendor decision | Module 7 scorecard | 1 page |
| 7. Organisational change | Module 9 layer audit | 1 page |
| 8. Sequencing, funding, metrics, degradation | Module 10 | 2 pages |
The Vantis Diagnostics case file
Vantis Diagnostics is fictional. It is a composite built to exercise every regime this course covers, and any resemblance to a specific company is coincidental.
The company. Laboratory diagnostics group headquartered in Utrecht, Netherlands. 2,400 staff. Three business lines: routine clinical testing for Dutch and Belgian hospitals; a specialty oncology panel sold across the EU; and a US subsidiary in Massachusetts performing clinical lab work for regional health systems. A patient-facing results portal operates in both regions.
The numbers. Group revenue β¬410m, EBIT margin 9.2%, down from 12.4% three years ago on payer pressure and reagent costs. The US subsidiary is 28% of revenue and 41% of the margin problem.
The pressure. The board has asked for an AI strategy by the end of the quarter. A competitor announced an "AI-native diagnostics platform" at a trade show six weeks ago; nobody at Vantis has been able to establish what it does.
The candidate projects, as they arrived on the director's desk:
| # | Proposal | Origin |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Denials management for the US billing operation | Revenue cycle, with a vendor attached |
| 2 | Lab throughput assistant reading technicians' free-text rejection notes | Operations |
| 3 | Result triage prioritising which results a clinician reviews first | Medical director, strong sponsor |
| 4 | Patient portal chatbot answering questions about results | Marketing |
| 5 | Automated coding of specialty panels | Finance, on a consultant's recommendation |
Known constraints. The US billing system exports once nightly and cannot be queried more often without a licence change. EU patient data may not leave the EU under current group policy. Two payers account for 61% of denied revenue. The two payer relationship leads hold knowledge captured in no system. The trailing twelve-month denial overturn rate is 31%; roughly 4,200 denials a year fall below the appeal threshold and are written off, worth about β¬2.1m.
What is not in the file. Deliberately: you will have to state assumptions. Doing so explicitly, and marking which ones your plan is sensitive to, is part of what is assessed.
Assessment rubric
Each dimension is scored 1 to 4. A pass requires 3 or better on every dimension β deliberately strict, because a plan that is excellent on seven dimensions and weak on governance is not a plan you can execute.
| Dimension | 1 β Absent | 2 β Asserted | 3 β Evidenced | 4 β Falsifiable |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Placement discipline | Everything is "AI" | Steps listed | Steps labelled with one-sentence justification per model step | A no-list with stated reasons per rejection |
| Evidence quality | Vendor claims repeated | Case studies cited | Pilot with a pre-registered metric | Baseline, counterfactual and decision rule, held by a non-sponsor |
| Governance | Not addressed | Policy referenced | Control map with named owners | Override test performed, result documented, gate redesigned if it failed |
| Economics | No numbers | Costs listed | TCO at projected volume, all four categories | Sensitivity to a 10Γ volume change and to a repricing |
| Organisational realism | Structure unchanged | Training mentioned | Layer audit completed | Reclaimed capacity named, with its use and the training-ground replacement |
| Sequencing | A wish list | Ordered by value | Ordered by value and readiness, with evidence value stated | Degrades gracefully under a 40% cut, with manual fallbacks |
A worked example of the difference
Take the economics dimension for the Vantis denials project.
Band 2 (asserted). "The vendor licence is β¬120k per year and we expect strong returns from improved denial recovery."
Band 3 (evidenced). "Three-year TCO of β¬640k: β¬360k licence, β¬90k inference at projected volume, β¬140k integration, β¬50k internal ownership at 0.2 FTE. Against a baseline overturn rate of 31%, the pilot reached 39% on 500 denials, worth β¬1.3m annually in recovered revenue."
Band 4 (falsifiable). As band 3, plus: "At 10Γ pilot volume, inference rises to β¬310k and TCO to β¬1.02m β still positive, but the margin narrows from 2.0Γ to 1.3Γ, so volume growth is the sensitivity to watch. The plan assumes the vendor's consumption pricing holds; the contract includes a repricing review at 18 months, and Module 1's cost trend suggests we should expect to renegotiate downward rather than up. If overturn is below 34% at 90 days, we roll back to manual drafting and the β¬140k integration spend is written off β that is the loss we are accepting to find out."
The third version is not longer because it is padded. It is longer because it contains the two sentences a board actually needs: what would change the answer, and what we lose if we are wrong.
How to use the rubric before you submit
Score your own draft honestly, dimension by dimension, and write the sentence that would move each 3 into a 4. Most plans arrive at 3s. The distance between a 3 and a 4 is usually one sentence per section β the sensitivity, the counterfactual, the rollback trigger β and adding those six sentences is the highest-value hour in this course.
Self-assessment questions
- Which section of your plan would collapse first under hostile questioning, and what evidence would fix it?
- What is the single measurable claim you are prepared to be judged on in twelve months, and who holds you to it?
- What did you decide not to do, and what specific change would reverse that decision?
- Which assumption in your plan is load-bearing and unverified? What is the cheapest way to test it in the next thirty days?
- If you were replaced tomorrow, could your successor execute this plan from the document alone? If not, what is missing is not detail β it is decision rights.
Where to go next
The artefacts you have built are not one-time deliverables. They are instruments with a cadence:
| Artefact | Review cadence |
|---|---|
| Labelled portfolio and no-list | Quarterly, as a standing agenda item |
| Control map | On every new system, and annually |
| Evaluation set | Continuously β it grows with every override |
| Layer audit | Annually, or on any reorganisation |
| Advantage thesis | Annually, against its own falsification clause |
The course ends here. The portfolio review does not.