CONDITIONS FOR INTERVENTION
You need this
when you are dealing with...
Pilots Without ROI
You have multiple AI pilots running but haven't seen a single meaningful impact on the quarterly P&L.
Strategic Fog
Hard to clearly articulate which AI initiatives are defensive vs. which are true market disruptors.
Opaque Spending/Costs
Your AI API costs are growing monthly with no clear attribution to business outcomes.
Talent Misalignment
Your best product and tech people are building ChatGPT wrappers instead of creating defensible IP.
Governance Drift
Internal staff are using unapproved tools with unsecured data exposing unquantified risk.
Board Pressure
The board seeks credible view of AI spend vs. AI opportunity but you lack a third-party objective view.
WHAT YOU GET
Deliverables of consequence
You don't get a slide deck.
You get investment decisions you can defend to your leadership and board.
Build / Buy / Partner Verdict
A clear recommendation on whether to build internally, buy off-the-shelf, or partner; all backed by financial rigor.
The Spend Baseline
A cataloging and review of every dollar currently directed toward automation and AI, reconciled against realized value.
Tactical Kill List
Identification of "zombie projects" that should be killed to reclaim capital & headcount for higher ROI initiatives.
AI Investment Decisioning Framework
A framework for evaluating future AI investment based on risk, strategic defensibility, and financial return.
METHODOLOGY
Three stages. Four to six weeks.
One clear set of answers.
01
Intake & Mapping
Week 1-2
Direct interviews with key stakeholders. Review of budgets, roadmaps, and vendor contracts. Compile an unvarnished picture of where the money is going and who owns each bet.
02
Analysis & Stress Test
Week 2-4
Each initiative scored on financial return, strategic defensibility, execution risk, urgency, and competitive impact. Evaluated against comparable deployments.
03
Decision Support
Week 4-6
Working session with leaders. Not a presentation, but a structured decision-making session where the portfolio choices get made in the room, with clear data.
IMPACT
What changes afterward.
We replace "doing AI" with "executing a rigorous strategy". The difference is measurable in both focus and capital efficiency.
Resources redeployed from low-impact vanity projects to core levers.
Board-level transparency on the exact ROI logic for every AI dollar.
A unified leadership team with a shared vocabulary for AI risk/reward.
Drastic reduction in the "noise" generated by external vendors and hype.
BEFORE INTERVENTION
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Every team has its own AI plans. The aggregate AI spend grows and the justifications keep changing.
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You're getting conflicting stories from people who each have a reason to protect their own initiatives.
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The pressure to show results is rising.
AFTER INTERVENTION
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You have one clear, board-ready view of the portfolio: what’s working, what isn’t, what to kill, and what deserves the next dollar.
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Investment decisions are easier to defend internally and to the board.
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The next 90 days have named owners, specific milestones, and a decision framework your team can reuse without outside help.
DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH
Independent judgment for high-stakes AI decisions.
Direct Senior Access
No junior staff, no handoffs. The person who scopes the project is the person who does the work and presents the findings.
Extreme Independence
We don't sell implementation services or software. Our only bias is your business performance.
Decision-Grade Rigor
Every recommendation comes with the financial logic, the assumptions, and the conditions under which we’d be wrong. No assertion without evidence.
NOT THIS
Large Firm Approach
Months of "discovery," generic industry benchmarks, and a revolving door of junior staff learning on your dime.
INSTEAD THIS
Strategic Intervention
Focused, high-intensity weeks of direct executive-to-executive strategic work designed to reach conclusions, not sell more contracts.
I built Vorpal Hedge to be the
antidote to consulting bloat.
I don't want to live in your office for six months.
I want to spend a few highly focused weeks
arming you with clear answers so you can
make decisions with confidence.
Led by Iliya Rybchin
FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
Top 25 AI Consultants & Thought Leaders
Consulting Magazine 2025
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Common questions, straight answers.
For most organizations, the bottleneck isn't time.
The bottleneck is focused access and clear decision criteria. Strategic Intervention is scoped tightly: we go deep on the specific portfolio decisions in front of leadership, not broad across every corner of the business. Four to six weeks is enough to produce defensible answers when the process is disciplined and the stakeholders are accessible.A standard AI audit typically produces a detailed inventory and a set of recommendations that sit in a report. Strategic Intervention is built around a specific set of decisions: which bets to back, which to stop, and what to demand before committing more capital. The output is a prioritized investment portfolio and a 90-day action plan — not a document.
Direct access to the executive sponsor and a focused set of stakeholders who know what's actually happening. That typically means 3–5 people across finance, technology, and the business areas running active AI efforts. Preparation time for your team is minimal. The process is designed to extract signal quickly, not to consume your people.
Engagement costs typically vary depending on the number of active AI initiatives, organizational complexity and the depth & breadth of the analysis you require. We agree a fixed fee before work begins. There are no hourly charges and no incentive to extend beyond what’s needed.
That's the most common situation.
The engagement is designed for organizations that already have initiatives in motion. The question we are answering is which ones deserve to continue and which ones don't. Existing projects aren't a complication. They're the input.
Rapid Triage is a useful starting point for organizations that aren't yet sure what they're working with. It produces a first-pass portfolio view in one week. Strategic Intervention makes sense when leadership already knows the situation is consequential enough to warrant a full assessment. If you're uncertain which is right, that conversation takes about 20 minutes.
You receive a prioritized investment portfolio, a defensible ROI framework, and an action plan with named owners and specific next steps.
Some clients move into an ongoing advisory arrangement. Others execute the plan independently and return when the next major decision point arrives. There's no pressure to extend — the goal is to leave you with enough clarity to move without us.
Internal teams have two constraints that are hard to overcome: proximity to the decisions already made, and organizational stakes in the outcome. Both limit candor. The value of an independent view is not that it's smarter. It's that it has no agenda. That changes what gets said out loud.
Completely. There are no case studies published without explicit permission, no client names used in marketing, and no information shared with third parties.
The nature of the impact of this work (terminating projects, allocating capital, navigating internal politics) demands it.
STRATEGIC INTERVENTION
Rigorous, independent review of consequential AI bets in an environment of extreme noise.
Your AI portfolio is burning capital. Find out exactly where.
When the question shifts from 'should we invest in AI' to 'where, how much, and what do we kill' - this is the engagement built for that moment.