A board-approved AI strategy for Altrad — a 15,000-employee industrial services group.

The situation

Altrad — a multi-billion-dollar industrial services group with more than 15,000 employees — needed a credible AI strategy it could take to the board, and then act on. AI was already a topic across leadership, but the conversations were fragmented: pockets of experimentation in different parts of the business, vendor pitches stacking up, and no shared view of where AI would actually create value for an organisation of this scale and complexity.

I was brought in as the sole AI consultant to cut through the noise and deliver something the executive team could endorse, the board could approve, and the operating businesses could move on.

The constraints

• The strategy had to land within the quarter, not next year.
• It had to cover three different business units — and the functions inside them, including operations, finance, HR, and client services — without becoming a generic deck.
• It had to be vendor-independent. Altrad had relationships with several major technology providers and any recommendation framed around a single vendor would be discounted.
• It needed quick wins to build internal momentum, alongside longer-horizon investments that justified the multi-year commitment.

What I did

I worked directly with leadership across the three target business units. The first week was structured discovery: where the real friction sits in the business, what the current AI experiments looked like, and where the highest-leverage opportunities were hiding in plain sight. The second week was synthesis — turning that picture into a roadmap, sequencing initiatives by value and feasibility, and building the case in a form the board could engage with.

Throughout, the goal was a strategy the organisation could execute, not a deck that would sit on a shared drive. That meant naming specific initiatives, identifying internal owners, and being honest about what Altrad could realistically build in-house versus what it should buy or partner on.

The outcome

• Board-approved AI strategy across all three business units within two weeks of kick-off.
• Now expanding to a company-wide rollout.
• A multi-year roadmap that names the priority opportunities and sequences them by value, complexity, and timing.
• The operating units left with a shared vocabulary for AI — so the next conversation, internal or with vendors, starts further down the field.

Why it worked

Two weeks is a lot to ask of a strategy engagement covering three business units. It worked because the work was done by one senior person with the technical depth to challenge claims directly, the patience to listen to operators rather than just executives, and the experience to recognise the difference between an AI use case that's plausible on paper and one that the organisation can actually ship.

This is the kind of engagement Metis Point exists for. If you're trying to get from "AI is on the agenda" to "AI is in the business" without losing a quarter to the discovery phase, that's the work I'm built for.

This maps to the Strategy & advisory engagement on the services page — typical timeline for that type of work is 1–2 weeks with a fixed or capped fee agreed upfront.