Service 05

AI-Ready Enterprise Architecture

Your AI works in the demo. The real question is whether it works in production - under security review, at real volumes, and at a cost per transaction your CFO will sign. We build the architecture foundation that gets AI initiatives there, grounded in TOGAF discipline and the Well-Architected Frameworks of OCI, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

TOGAF ADMAI Reference ArchitectureWell-Architected ReviewsAI Unit EconomicsEBITDA Business CaseBuild vs BuyArchitecture Governance
The Challenge

AI pilots rarely fail at the model. They fail at the architecture.

Most AI initiatives start well. A proof of concept impresses the leadership team, a budget is approved, and a go-live date is set. Then production arrives. The security team asks where the data goes. The integration team finds the AI component was never designed to talk to the ERP, the CRM or the core platform. Finance asks what each AI transaction will cost at ten times today's volume. Nobody has the answers, because nobody designed for those questions.

This is an architecture gap, not a technology gap. It shows up as pilots that never graduate, three teams building three incompatible AI stacks, cloud bills that grow faster than the benefit, and business cases that report hours saved but never move the EBITDA line.

Discuss this service

What we deliver

AI Architecture Readiness ScorecardYour AI initiative assessed across five lenses: business alignment, data and integration, security and compliance, operability, and unit economics
Target AI Reference ArchitectureIntegration patterns, model and platform selection criteria, and a landing zone design for AI workloads on your chosen cloud
Guardrails & Control FrameworkSecurity, data residency, human-in-the-loop and responsible-AI controls designed in from the start, not added before an audit
AI Unit Economics & EBITDA BridgeCost per AI transaction, a run-cost forecast at scale, and a finance-grade view of what the initiative does to EBITDA
90-Day Roadmap & Governance ModelSequenced, fundable next steps and a review mechanism that keeps every new AI initiative on the same foundation
How We Engage

Start with a diagnostic. Continue only while it keeps earning its place.

Every engagement begins with one question worth answering well: is this AI initiative ready for production, and if not, what stands in the way? From there, you decide how far to take it. Each step is scoped, time-bound and follows our one-month-minimum, no lock-in model.

Our diagnostic is independent. It can conclude that an initiative should pause, be redesigned, or go to a different delivery partner. Where we recommend implementation partners, any commercial relationship is disclosed to you in writing. An architecture review that always says "build" is not a review.

Three ways to engage

AI Architecture Readiness Diagnostic (2-3 weeks, fixed fee)One AI initiative, five lenses, a scorecard, a risk register and a 90-day roadmap. The fastest honest answer to "where do we stand?"
AI Reference Architecture & Guardrails Stream (6-8 weeks)A tailored, lightweight run of the TOGAF ADM, Phases A to D plus governance, producing the target architecture, controls and cost model your teams build against
Architecture Governance as a Service (monthly)A fractional chief architect: architecture review board, pre-funding reviews of new AI initiatives, and a roadmap kept honest quarter after quarter
Grounded in EA Discipline

TOGAF sets the direction. Each cloud's framework sets the standard.

Enterprise architecture and cloud architecture are usually practised by different people who rarely meet. The EA team writes principles that engineers never read. The cloud team builds landing zones that business owners never understand. AI initiatives fall into the gap between them.

We work both layers as one. Sethunath is a TOGAF 10 certified Enterprise Architecture Practitioner, and every engagement follows the Architecture Development Method: architecture vision and business case first (Phase A), then business, data, application and technology architecture (Phases B to D), then migration planning, implementation governance and change management (Phases E to H). We keep it lightweight. The ceremony is optional. The discipline is not.

At the platform layer, every design is reviewed against the provider's own framework, so your architecture holds up to the questions your cloud provider, your auditor and your enterprise customers will ask. Oracle Cloud Certified Architect Professional and multicloud credentials sit behind that review, along with years of running OCI and AWS workloads for airline, pharma and logistics customers.

Frameworks we design and review against

TOGAF Standard, 10th EditionADM-led architecture vision, capability mapping, architecture principles, and governance through an Architecture Review Board
OCI Cloud Adoption Framework (OCAF) & OCI Well-Architected FrameworkAdoption strategy from business case to cloud centre of excellence, then security and compliance, reliability and resilience, performance and cost optimization, operational efficiency, and distributed cloud, anchored on OCI Landing Zones
AWS Well-Architected FrameworkAll six pillars, from operational excellence to sustainability, with the Generative AI and Machine Learning Lenses applied to AI workloads
Microsoft Azure Well-Architected & Cloud Adoption FrameworksReliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence and performance efficiency, including Azure's guidance for AI workloads
Google Cloud Well-Architected FrameworkOperational excellence, security, reliability, and cost and performance optimization, with its AI and ML perspective
Multicloud principlesOne set of architecture principles across every platform you run, so a second cloud does not become a second architecture
From Hours Saved to EBITDA Earned

An AI business case your CFO will actually sign.

Most AI business cases stop at effort: hours saved, FTEs freed, tickets deflected. Operations heads like those numbers. CFOs discount them, because freed capacity only reaches EBITDA when it becomes a cost no longer paid, a hire no longer needed, or revenue now captured. EBITDA moves in two ways only: revenue grows without headcount growing with it, or operating cost falls in COGS or SG&A.

We build the case the way a Deal P&L is built, from the unit up. What does one AI-assisted transaction cost today, including inference, tokens, orchestration, guardrails and the human review that stays in the loop? What does the manual version cost? How do both curves move at three times and ten times the volume? The answer is an EBITDA bridge: baseline, AI run-cost, realisable savings, revenue effects and payback, in a form finance can audit.

We show every case three ways: EBITDA, EBIT and cash. EBITDA shows operating efficiency. EBIT shows what the investment really costs once amortisation is counted. Cash shows when the money comes back. A case that only looks good on one of the three is a case to question.

The same baseline becomes the anchor for outcome-based commercial models. When the number is agreed before the build starts, you can pay for what changes rather than for who is staffed. This work draws directly on our ROI & TCO practice.

What the EBITDA bridge covers

Cost-to-serve baselineCurrent cost per transaction, per process and per customer tier, agreed with finance before any design work starts
AI run-cost modelInference and token charges, GPU or managed-service costs, data platform, storage, observability and human-in-the-loop effort, forecast at scale
Realisable versus theoretical savingsWhich capacity release becomes cash, which avoids future cost, and which stays as capacity. Counted separately, never blended
Revenue and margin effectsFaster cycle times, higher throughput, and new services priced on the AI capability
AI drag reviewShadow AI subscriptions and duplicate seats, pilots with uncapped spend, frontier models used where a smaller model would do, and output that needs so much rework it adds token cost on top of labour cost
Payback, sensitivity and kill criteriaBreak-even volume, sensitivity to model pricing, and a pre-agreed signal that stops an initiative before it burns cash
Build or Buy

Build or buy agentic AI? Let volume and economics decide, not the vendor.

An AI SaaS product is quick to start and easy to stop. Every seat and every surcharge is operating expense, from the first month to the last. A custom agentic build asks for engineering investment up front, then runs on tokens, infrastructure and maintenance. The per-unit cost falls away sharply as volume grows. Which one wins depends on how much volume you have, how fast it grows, and how proprietary the workflow is.

We model both options over three years and find the crossover: the Year 1 volume above which the build beats the licence. One trap needs naming. Capitalising development cost keeps it out of EBITDA, so a build can look better on EBITDA than it really is. We calculate the crossover twice, once on EBITDA and once including the capital outlay on EBIT and cash, and we make the recommendation on the stricter test. Whether the cost can be capitalised at all is for your auditor to confirm under IAS 38 or Ind AS 38.

What the build-vs-buy model shows

Three-year P&L for both optionsLicences and onboarding against build outlay, tokens, infrastructure and maintenance, year by year
Two crossover thresholdsThe volume at which build wins on EBITDA, and the higher volume at which it wins on EBIT and cash
Payback and cumulative cashWhen the build investment is recovered, shown as a cumulative cash line rather than an average
SensitivityHow the answer moves with growth rate, licence price, token price and realisable savings
Decision guidanceBuy for standard workflows, fast deployment or missing AI engineering talent. Build where volume is high, the workflow is a differentiator, and capital is available
For IT Services Firms

On time-and-materials, AI efficiency is a gift to your client.

On a time-and-materials contract, every hour AI saves is an hour you no longer bill. Take an illustrative engagement of 1,000 hours billed at $100 and delivered at $60: revenue of $100,000 and a gross margin of 40%. Halve the hours with agentic delivery and revenue halves too. The margin percentage stays where it was, and the absolute profit falls by half.

Now price the same scope as a fixed-price or outcome-based contract at $100,000. Delivery becomes 500 hours of human effort at $30,000 plus $3,000 of agent compute. Revenue holds. Gross margin rises to 67%. The efficiency stays with you instead of flowing to the client. Getting there takes more than a pricing change. Delivery has to be engineered, measured and contracted differently, and that is architecture work.

What the transition needs

An agentic delivery stackStandard delivery schemas and human-in-the-loop gates at the points where judgement and accountability sit
Blended unit economicsLabour hours plus inference cost per deliverable, with model-routing rules so expensive models are used only where they earn it
Outcome-based contractingMilestone pricing backed by automated acceptance tests, so both sides agree what "done" means before work starts
Redesigned delivery podsFewer layers: a senior architect, agentic tooling and a quality validator in place of the traditional pyramid
Capacity reallocationA plan for the hours released: more fixed-price work, or less reliance on external contractors. Otherwise the savings never reach EBITDA
Who This Is For

Built for organisations moving AI from experiment to operation.

This service fits mid-market ISVs embedding AI into products sold to enterprise customers, IT services firms moving from time-and-materials to fixed-price agentic delivery, and enterprises in banking, healthcare, aviation, logistics, pharma and hospitality running AI on mission-critical processes. It is most valuable at one of three moments: before a pilot is funded for production, when several AI initiatives are running without a common foundation, or when an enterprise customer's security and architecture review is holding up a deal.

It also connects the rest of our work. Reliability links to Operational Maturity. Security links to Security Compliance. Profitability links to ROI & TCO. The value story links to SaaS Value Selling. Enterprise architecture is the thread through all four, which is why many clients start here.

Typical engagement outcomes

Pilots that graduateAI initiatives reach production with security, integration and operations signed off, not deferred
One foundation, many initiativesShared platform, patterns and guardrails, so each new AI use case costs less than the last
Faster enterprise security reviewsArchitecture documentation mapped to cloud frameworks and customer questionnaires, ready before procurement asks
Finance-grade AI economicsA business case that survives CFO scrutiny and a cost curve you can defend at scale
Why It Matters
AI that holds up in production
🛡️

Reliable

Designed for failure from day one: fallbacks when a model is slow or wrong, resilience patterns, and operations your team can actually run.

📈

Scalable

Unit economics understood before the volume arrives, so growth improves margin instead of eroding it.

🔒

Secure

Data residency, access control and AI-specific risks such as prompt injection handled in the architecture, not in a remediation plan.

💰

Profitable

An EBITDA bridge finance can audit, and kill criteria that stop low-value initiatives early.

🧭

Governed

Every new AI initiative reviewed against the same principles before it is funded, not after it fails.

🔄

Portable

Model and platform choices kept open, so a price change or a better model does not force a rebuild.

Is your AI initiative ready for production?

Start with a 30-minute discovery call. Sethunath will tell you where the architecture risk sits, and whether a diagnostic is worth doing.

Book Discovery Call →