Risk & Readiness Assessment

The Challenge: Early Failures in Vision AI

Most vision AI projects stumble long before deployment. The root cause? They set off in the wrong direction and bake in the very risks that later show up as last-mile AI gaps.

Typical pitfalls include:

Incomplete or biased imagery — missing conditions, devices, or geographies.
Annotation bottlenecks — underestimated cost, scale, or labeling consistency.
Misaligned model choices — architectures too large for edge devices or too weak for variability.
Weak validation plans — failures surface only when tested in new sites, on new devices, or under new conditions.
Missing domain expertise — models optimized for benchmarks rather than solving the real-world problem that matters

By the time these issues appear, months of effort and budget have already been lost — and the project is heading straight for a last-mile breakdown.

The Fix: Stress-Test Assumptions Before You Build

A short, structured engagement that challenges your assumptions before the project ramps up.

The Risk & Readiness Assessment helps you:

Identify hidden risks in your data, models, and domain constraints.
Ensure the project is aligned with real-world impact, not just academic metrics.
Prioritize which issues matter most for robustness and scalability.
Define practical mitigation steps for the next 30–90 days.
Align engineers, scientists, and leadership around a clear plan forward.

The goal: prevent the common last-mile gaps by designing against them from day one.

Who It’s For

Teams starting new vision AI initiatives — transformers, foundation models, multimodal pipelines, edge deployments, etc.
Organizations with large image datasets but unclear annotation or pretraining strategy.
Startups and scale-ups needing to de-risk ambitious projects before investors or leadership sign off.
R&D groups seeking confidence that vision models will hold up beyond the lab and solve problems that matter in the field.

What You Get

Structured Questionnaire: A short set of questions to capture your project goals, data sources, annotation strategy, and model plans. This must be completed at least 48 hours before the working session so I can review it in advance.
Expert Review: I analyze your responses to surface potential risks and blind spots.
90-Minute Live Call: A focused discussion to dig into the highest-priority risks and clarify where your project may run into challenges.
Concise Report: A 5–7 page summary highlighting the top risks, recommended mitigation plan, and practical next steps.

Why It Matters

A few hours now can save months (or years) later:

Prevent wasted model training cycles and costly rework.
Reduce unnecessary data collection and annotation expense.
Ensure architectures fit your real-world deployment constraints.
Confirm projects are solving the right problem with domain alignment.
Build confidence with executives, investors, and partners that your vision AI project is set up for success.

By surfacing these risks at the start, you prevent the very issues that cause most teams to fail at the last mile.

Investment

The assessment is a fixed-fee engagement with pricing tailored to your organization’s stage:

Startups: $3,000 flat fee — scoped for lean teams with fewer stakeholders
Larger organizations: typically $5,000–$7,500, depending on scope and number of stakeholders

The cost of one poorly scoped project, dataset, or modeling effort can exceed this many times over. This assessment helps you prevent those missteps before they compound and become last-mile failures.

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Don’t just take my word for it…

Heather has accelerated the development of our machine learning projects by challenging the status quo and introducing the team to new approaches. She helped us get out of the echo chamber and brought an outside perspective with very relevant alternative approaches that would have taken a lot longer to do on our own.

-- Joe Sturonas, Ancera, VP of Systems Development

Pixel Scientia provides valuable insights for Gestalt's image analysis product development. Heather has deep understanding of digital pathology and machine learning and their application to whole slide images. Her in-depth review of the current state of the art research has enabled Gestalt to rapidly focus our machine learning efforts on approaches that are yielding value for our pathologists and their patients.

-- Brian Napora, Gestalt Diagnostics, VP of Sales & Product Management

Still have questions?

Why do I need a Risk & Readiness Assessment? Can’t my team figure this out internally?

Even the best technical teams can miss early risks when they’re too close to their own work. This assessment brings an outside perspective — grounded in 20 years of vision AI experience — to surface blind spots, prevent costly detours, and give your team confidence before investing heavily.

How is this different from a consulting project?

The assessment is a focused, one-time engagement. It’s designed to give you clarity, a prioritized risk map, and practical next steps. If you’d like support implementing the recommendations, we can explore an advisory partnership — but there’s no obligation.

Who should be involved in the call?

Ideally, technical leads (data scientists, ML engineers), at least one domain expert, and decision-makers (team leads, executives, or project sponsors). This ensures alignment between the people building the models and those accountable for outcomes.

When is the right time to do an asessment?

The earlier, the better. Teams often wait until problems surface in training or validation — when they’re far more expensive to fix. This assessment adds the most value before those issues compound and become apparent.

What if my project isn’t very far along yet?

That’s fine — in fact, that’s ideal. Early-stage teams often save the most by spotting risks before they commit significant time or budget.

What if we decide not to move forward afterward?

You’ll still walk away with a clear, actionable report to strengthen your project. The Risk & Readiness Assessment is valuable whether or not we continue working together.

Still not sure if this is the right package for you?

Schedule a free Pixel Clarity Call, and I’ll help you determine if this is a good fit.