Business case: a standing strategic assessment platform

The problem

Every consulting engagement starts at zero. The first month is the analyst learning our domain, our sources, our adversaries, our prior decisions. We pay for that month every time. The deliverable is a frozen snapshot that goes stale the day a key input changes, and we can't interrogate any conclusion down to the document that produced it. When a reviewer challenges a number on page four, we're calling the consultant back. When the world shifts, we start over.

Proposed engagement

Twelve to sixteen weeks. Syntheos sets Deepfield up for our domain, works through the scope of our first questions with our subject matter experts, and runs the first real assessment alongside our team. Our analysts approve each question's scope and review the report before anyone releases it. By week sixteen the system runs end to end on a strategic question we choose, our team has run it at least once with Syntheos out of the room, and we own the deployed code and the data.

What we get

• Decisions made in days after the first deployment. Later assessments run at the cost of compute, with our team operating the system.
• Citations ready before the challenge arrives. Every cited statement carries a verbatim quote from its source, checked against the stored copy, and our analysts have checked the key judgments against the sources by hand, so a reviewer's question starts with the evidence already on the page.
• An asset that compounds. Every run keeps its evidence, its reasoning, and its predictions, and every prediction is scored when it resolves. Over time the track record shows how far to trust the next assessment.
• Independence from the vendor. The code and the data run on our infrastructure. If Syntheos is unavailable for any reason, our team continues to operate the system.
• An assessment our team can audit. Each run keeps the searches as issued, the sources as retrieved, every prompt, and every model response, so any analyst on the team can see exactly what the system saw and said.

Risks and mitigations

• What if Syntheos disappears. The deployed code and the data live on our infrastructure under our license. The system runs without Syntheos personnel.
• What if a judgment is wrong. Each key judgment is backed by dated propositions, and as they resolve the report shows whether the judgment is holding, weakening, or contradicted. Every forecast is scored, the misses included, so we can see where the system goes wrong and how often.
• What if our team can't run it without Syntheos in the room. Training is part of scope, and the engagement does not close until our team has run a complete assessment with Syntheos out of the loop.
• What if our handling requirements change mid-engagement. We scope where the system runs and what data it may touch before work starts, and revisit that scope if the requirements change. Syntheos does unclassified work today.
• What if we want to leave. License terms allow our team to fork and operate independently, and we own the data and the ledger outright.

Success metrics

• First strategic assessment delivered in week sixteen, on a question that matters to our team.
• Our team runs the second assessment with Syntheos out of the room and ships the output independently.
• A reviewer challenges a judgment. Our team opens the quoted passages behind it and answers from the sources.
• Once the first propositions resolve, our team can see how the forecasts scored against a status-quo baseline.

Investment and timeline

Twelve to sixteen weeks for the first deployment. Cost varies with the depth of the question, the size of the source corpus, and the security environment, so a single public range would be misleading. A scoping conversation produces a fixed first-year number before any contract is signed. For most engagements that first-year investment lands close to the cost of one consulting engagement of similar scope. Later assessments run at the cost of compute, which is when the system pays for itself. Annual hosting and support is a small percentage of the first-year cost. We can self-host or use Syntheos-managed infrastructure depending on handling requirements and operational preferences.

Recommended next step

Send Syntheos a strategic question from our domain. Within two weeks, they'll draft the scope with us, run Deepfield's research step on it, and walk us through the scope and the evidence it gathered. There is no fee. By the end of the two-hour walkthrough, we'll know whether the system produces material we trust. Syntheos asks one thing in return. Whoever owns the decision is in the room for the walkthrough.