Glossary
The method, in plain terms.
A short glossary of how we work and the words we use for it. If you've read How It Works, none of this is new — it's here so the definitions are easy to find, cite, and check.
- Value mapping
- Cladens's core method: tracing a business objective down through its value drivers to the specific value levers AI can move, then matching each lever to the AI capability that shifts it — so every AI investment traces back to a chosen objective instead of starting from the technology.
- AI Capability Roadmap
- Cladens's umbrella methodology for mid-market AI adoption: it maps objectives to value levers and sequences the build to organizational maturity, producing a staged roadmap rather than a one-off pilot. The named tools beneath it are the AI Maturity Lens and the AI Value Map.
- AI Maturity Lens
- A structured assessment of an organization's readiness to adopt AI across five dimensions — Data, Governance, Talent, Digital & Systems, and Leadership & Change — each scored L0 (deterministic only) to L4 (agentic operations).
- MIN rule (binding-constraint rule)
- Cladens scores overall AI maturity as the minimum across the five dimensions, not the average, because the weakest dimension caps what an organization can safely deploy.
- AI Value Map
- The deliverable from a Cladens Discovery: a document tracing the client's objective to prioritized value levers, a maturity profile, a per-lever fit recommendation, a sequenced roadmap, an investment case, and an explicit list of what is not recommended and why.
- Fit Matrix
- Cladens's two-axis decision tool that crosses a lever's required change depth (shallow / medium / deep) with the organization's AI maturity to produce one of four answers per lever: build now, build with change management, design first, or wait.
- Change depth
- How much organizational change a lever intrinsically requires: shallow (AI handles a sub-task, role unchanged), medium (role mix or KPIs shift), or deep (the process is redesigned).
- Workflow Autonomy Ladder
- A five-level description of a solution's autonomy (L0 deterministic workflows → L4 fully LLM-driven with human-in-the-loop). It describes the solution, distinct from the AI Maturity Lens, which describes the organization.
- North Star outcome lanes
- The four high-level objectives Cladens maps work to: Operational Excellence, Customer Excellence, Workforce Leverage, and Revenue Acceleration.
- The five AI capability categories
- Knowledge Intelligence, Document Intelligence, Workflow Intelligence, Decision Intelligence, and the cross-cutting AI Governance & Operations.
- Discovery
- Cladens's common front-door engagement (about three weeks, paid) that produces the AI Value Map and one recommendation: proceed to Build, or to Design + Build.
- Engagement flow
- Discovery (diagnose and recommend) → Build (implement on existing processes) or Design + Build (redesign the process first, then build) → Monitor (govern and maintain in production).