We tell you where AI does not belong
Roughly a third of the use cases we look at should never get built, and we say so before anyone signs anything. A no you hear in week one is worth far more than a yes that quietly falls apart in month four.
AI adoption consulting · East and West
AI adoption that survives contact with reality.
Senior consulting for companies that want AI doing real work in the business, not sitting in a board deck. We have run it inside large organizations, so we know where it earns its keep and where it quietly burns the budget. China on the horizon or not, the job is the same.
The method AZIMUTH · five gated phases
Pilot 07 Cleared every gate it agreed to
Who runs it
Twenty-five years building digital and commerce across Asia and Europe. We have done the job, not just advised on it.
Cyril Drouin opened one of China's first eCommerce agencies back in 2003, then ran Publicis Commerce and Performance Marketing across China and North Asia. AI adoption is the same work as the last twenty years. Find the signal, ship the thing that holds up, and hand the team something they can run on their own.
Most AI programs do not stall on technology. They stall on honesty.
Pilots that promise the moon. Tools bought before anyone has named the problem. Roadmaps written to land well in a board meeting and never meant to be built. We start from the opposite end.
You pay for evidence, not promises
Every pilot has a kill line we set with you before it starts. If it misses on your own data, we shut it down. Nobody here is going to keep a dead project breathing just because it already cost money.
Your team runs it without us
Training and handover sit inside the method. They are not a separate invoice we wave at you later. When we walk out, the work keeps running and what we figured out stays in the building.
AZIMUTH
The bearing we steer by. Five phases, with a gate between each one. You move to the next only when the evidence has earned it.
- Bearings Where are you, really?
- Chart Where is the value, and where is it not?
- Crossing Can it survive your operations?
- Build Ship what survived.
- Anchor Does it stick once we leave?
Horizon Underneath all of it, we keep watch on what is moving in AI, east and west, and translate it into what actually matters for the work in front of you.
Four ways in. Start where you are.
Take the full arc or a single piece. Each one earns its keep on its own.
Assessment
A ranked shortlist of use cases and a roadmap you can act on Monday morning.
- Every candidate scored on what it is worth and how hard it is to ship.
- The ones we would leave alone, with the reasoning in plain words.
- A roadmap you own outright, whether you keep us on or not.
Pilot
Success and kill criteria on the table before we write a line of code.
- Tested east and west on your own data, never a vendor demo set.
- Every number checked against a target you signed off on first.
- What clears the gate ships. What does not, we stop, and we tell you why.
Continuum
Senior judgment in the room each month, without carrying a full-time hire.
- Adoption and governance, run end to end every month.
- Quarterly steering with your leadership, in plain business terms.
- The plan keeps moving while your team keeps shipping.
Academy
Built so your people can carry the work once we are gone.
- Executive masterclasses that separate the signal from the hype.
- Leadership and team workshops on your real tasks, not toy ones.
- Founder-led practitioner training, hands on the keyboard.
East and West
We benchmark both sides. On your data.
The right model is whichever one does your job best. We run both ecosystems side by side, on the same task, and let the results pick the winner.
Your data stays out of China unless you specifically ask for a China-hosted deployment.
East
- Qwen
- DeepSeek
- Kimi
West
- GPT
- Claude
- Gemini
Deep in the functions that touch revenue and people
The standard
What works in a demo and what works on your floor are rarely the same thing.
The only proof we trust is your own data, under your real constraints, measured against a target we set together before any work began.
Anything short of that is a sales demo. We are not in that business.
Ready when you are Start with your bearings.