The AI Opportunity Sprint
Run personally by Shea Long and Mike Burns. No template. No junior team. Your operation, specifically.
Most executive teams have spent two years talking about AI. They've read the reports, attended the conferences, sat through the vendor demos. What they don't have is a prioritized list of what to actually do first — and who owns it. The Sprint is the day that produces that list.
No pricing on this page. Every Sprint is scoped to your organization. Start with a conversation.
Why this exists
The pattern across mid-market organizations is consistent. AI awareness is high. Everyone in the C-suite has read the same McKinsey pieces and watched the same Gartner presentations. The problem isn't awareness — it's translation. Nobody has a document that tells the CEO, the COO, and the CFO what to do first.
Vendor-led assessments don't produce it because vendors have something to sell. Internal working groups don't produce it because they move at the pace of committee consensus and lack the external perspective to challenge what they've always assumed. Generalist strategy firms don't produce it because AI transformation requires a fundamentally different operating model than traditional consulting can support.
The Sprint exists because mid-market leadership teams deserve one day that produces clarity — not a deck with seventeen workstreams and a three-year dependency on the firm that wrote it. You leave with a prioritized list, a preliminary roadmap, and alignment in the room. We don't hold the keys.
The deliverables
Everything produced in the Sprint belongs to you. No license, no ongoing obligation, no IP held by CPP.
Each initiative leaves the room with four components: a Problem Statement grounded in your specific operation, a Solution Concept that maps AI capability to the problem, a Technical Approach that reflects your actual infrastructure and team, and a Named Owner who holds accountability after the Sprint ends. These are not theoretical options. They are decisions.
The word "preliminary" is intentional. Roadmaps that claim to predict AI capability three years out are selling false certainty. What this gives your team is a frame — sequenced priorities, rough dependency mapping, and enough structure to make resource allocation decisions without waiting for perfect information.
Before anyone enters the room, we've already done the work. CEO vision documentation, a bespoke session agenda built around your organization's specific context, and framing documents that let the day move fast. The pre-work is what separates a productive working session from a meeting that could have been an email.
This one doesn't appear on a slide. It's a side effect of the process — shared understanding across your executive team about what AI can and cannot do for your organization, what you're committing to, and who owns what. Most organizations underestimate how rare that is. Most leave the Sprint surprised by how much it changes what happens in the following quarter.
The structure
The Sprint runs as a full-day working session. Shea Long and/or Mike Burns facilitate from first hour to last.
Morning
We open with a structured orientation — not introductions, not ice-breakers. The first hour exists to establish shared vocabulary, surface the assumptions your team has been operating on, and identify where the pre-work revealed gaps or misalignment. By hour two, we are already into your operation.
Afternoon
The afternoon is where the work gets done. We move through each initiative candidate, pressure-test the framing, clarify ownership, and force the prioritization decisions that most organizations have been deferring. The conversation is direct. Facilitation here means cutting, not extending.
The close
We end the day with a read-back. Every initiative, every owner, every next step — spoken aloud in the room, confirmed, and documented. You leave with a draft of the deliverables in your hands, not a promise that they'll arrive in two weeks.
Before anyone enters the room
Eight hours of structured pre-work precedes every Sprint. This is not background reading. It is a disciplined process that produces the documents the day runs on.
We start with the CEO — a direct conversation about where the organization is, what the leadership team has tried, and what's actually driving the decision to run the Sprint now. That conversation becomes the foundation for every other piece of pre-work.
From there we build a bespoke session agenda. Not a template with your logo on it — an agenda designed around your industry, your competitive environment, your organizational structure, and the specific decisions you need to leave the day having made. When participants walk in, the room is already set up to produce the output. The time in the session is not spent orienting. It is spent working.
The people in the room
Co-Founder
Shea has spent his career at the intersection of operational leadership and technology transformation. Before founding Covington Place Partners, he held executive roles in mid-market organizations across multiple industries — which means his frame of reference in the Sprint room is not the consultant's frame. It is the operator's frame. He knows what actually breaks when you try to move fast, and he builds the agenda accordingly.
Co-Founder
Mike brings the technical depth that separates actionable AI strategy from well-intentioned aspiration. He evaluates AI initiatives not on their theoretical potential but on whether your organization can actually implement and sustain them — given your infrastructure, your team, and your operating reality. In the Sprint, he is the person who keeps the conversation grounded in what is true, not what is interesting.
When you book a Sprint, you are booking Shea and Mike. Not a team member who has been trained on their methodology. Them, specifically.
After the Sprint
The Sprint output is yours. The prioritized initiatives, the roadmap, the framing documents — you own all of it, unconditionally. There is no license requirement, no ongoing obligation to CPP, no IP held back.
Some organizations take the Sprint output and execute it themselves. That is exactly what it was designed to support. Others find, after a few months, that one or more of the initiatives has grown in scope or complexity to the point where external expertise adds clear value. In those cases, we're available. But that conversation is a separate one, initiated by you, on your terms.
We do not engineer the Sprint to create dependency. If anything, we engineer it to eliminate it. The organizations we want to work with are ones that chose to come back — not ones that felt they had to.
Start the conversation
The Sprint is available to mid-market organizations — typically five hundred to five thousand employees — across industries. It is not right for every organization at every stage, and we will tell you that plainly if it applies to yours.
Talk to Us About a SprintWe'll ask about your organization, your leadership structure, and what's driven you to this point. If the Sprint is the right fit, we'll tell you. If it isn't, we'll tell you that too.