Business case: a standing decision assessment platform
Executive summary
Commission Syntheos to embed and configure Deepfield for our domain: a nine-stage assessment pipeline that takes a strategic question and returns a ranked, defensible course of action with full W3C PROV lineage on every conclusion. What we buy is not a report. It's the standing system our team runs.
The problem
We make recurring strategic assessments. Today each one gets outsourced to a consultancy, which means we pay for the analyst's learning curve every single time, the deliverable is a frozen snapshot, and we can't interrogate any conclusion down to the specific evidence that produced it. When the inputs shift, we start over.
Proposed engagement
A 12 to 16 week engagement to configure Deepfield for our domain and run the first real assessment together with our team. Deepfield's nine stages cover intake, deep research, extraction, knowledge graph construction, MCTS reasoning, asymmetry and assumption analysis, course-of-action generation, wargame simulation, and output assembly. Every stage carries PROV-compliant lineage, so the final recommendation traces back through the entire chain to source evidence.
What we get
- The running Deepfield pipeline, configured for our domain and sources
- The knowledge graph built during the first assessment, available for re-use
- Our team trained to re-run assessments independently
- Full source code and data, owned by us
- The first real assessment's outputs: ranked courses of action, evidence lineage, wargame results
Risks and mitigations
The main risk is that the outputs do not meet our standards on the first pass. Mitigation: Deepfield's design explicitly surfaces assumptions, runs red-team panels, and stress-tests the reasoning, so the first run includes self-critique. A second risk is over-reliance on automated reasoning. Mitigation: every recommendation ships with its evidence lineage, so our team can always audit the chain and override when needed.
Success metrics
- Pipeline runs end-to-end on our domain without stage failures
- Every recommendation traces back to source evidence through PROV lineage
- Our team successfully runs an assessment without Syntheos in the loop
- Cost of the second assessment is a fraction of the first
Investment and timeline
12 to 16 weeks for the first deployment. The one-time investment is higher than a single consulting engagement and lower than two. Break-even typically happens during the second assessment, when the pipeline runs on the already-built graph and our team runs it.
Recommended next step
A technical briefing with Syntheos engineers to walk through Deepfield's architecture, discuss which of our assessments would best fit the first deployment, and agree on scope.