Candidate Assessment
Director of AI Strategy /
AI Strategist
Demonstrate your ability to translate discovery findings into compelling AI solutions for clients.
Background
As a core offering, Cadre AI provides Departmental Deep Dives — intensive discovery engagements where we interview stakeholders across specific departments to uncover pain points that AI could address. We speak with executives, managers, and individual contributors to understand what's manual, what doesn't scale, and where the team is spending time on low-value work.
Our goal is always to find opportunities to drive revenue, increase profitability, or elevate employees by enabling them to focus on higher-value work.
The Scenario
🏢 Client: ACME Corporation
You've just completed a deep dive of ACME's Sales & Marketing department. Over two weeks, you conducted interviews with stakeholders at all levels and documented the findings below.
Sally Martinez (CMO)
⚠️ Situation Change
Your 30-day readout meeting — where you'd normally walk through all findings and present AI solutions — was canceled because Bill is out sick. However, Bill and Sally are eager to hear what you've found and have asked you to record a video walking them through the top opportunities instead of waiting to reschedule.
Discovery Findings
Below are the eight key pain points identified during the deep dive. Review all of them carefully — you'll need to select four for your presentation.
Content Production Bottleneck
The marketing team lacks the bandwidth to produce content at the volume needed to maintain competitive visibility. Currently, one team member manages all written content creation, severely limiting output and preventing the team from pursuing a more aggressive content strategy.
"I can realistically produce two blog posts, one newsletter, and maybe two or three social posts per month with everything else on my plate. Leadership wants us to publish weekly, but there's just no way I can get there alone."
— Rachel Kim, Content Marketing Manager
Slow Proposal Turnaround
Sales reps spend 4-6 hours creating each custom proposal, pulling from past documents, updating pricing, and tailoring messaging. This creates delays in the sales cycle and means reps spend significant time on document work rather than selling.
"Every proposal feels like I'm starting from scratch. I dig through old decks, copy-paste sections, update numbers manually... it's at least half a day per deal. And if the prospect wants revisions, we're talking another few hours."
— Marcus Thompson, Senior Account Executive
Lead Qualification Inconsistency
Inbound leads are manually reviewed and routed by a single SDR, creating a bottleneck and inconsistent qualification. High-value leads sometimes sit for days, while lower-priority inquiries get immediate attention based purely on order received.
"I try to prioritize, but when 40 leads come in over a weekend and I'm looking at them Monday morning, I honestly just start at the top. I've definitely had situations where a great lead went cold because I didn't get to it fast enough."
— Devon Patel, Sales Development Representative
Campaign Performance Reporting Delays
The marketing team spends the first week of every month manually pulling data from six different platforms into spreadsheets to create performance reports. By the time insights are ready, it's often too late to make meaningful mid-month adjustments.
"Our CMO asks for a weekly dashboard, but pulling the data from Google Ads, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and our other tools takes me two full days. So we really only have reliable monthly data, and by then we've already spent the budget."
— James Okonkwo, Marketing Operations Analyst
CRM Data Hygiene Issues
Sales reps inconsistently log activities and update opportunity stages in Salesforce. Management lacks reliable pipeline visibility, and forecasting accuracy suffers because the data doesn't reflect reality. Reps cite the time burden as the main reason for poor compliance.
"I know I should update Salesforce after every call, but when I'm back-to-back with prospects all day, logging notes is the last thing I want to do. By Friday, I can barely remember what happened Monday."
— Aisha Johnson, Account Executive
Personalization at Scale Challenges
The team knows personalized outreach performs better but can't execute it at scale. Email campaigns go out with generic messaging because customizing content for different segments or accounts would require headcount they don't have.
"We have eight distinct buyer personas and three industries we target. To really personalize our nurture sequences, we'd need 24 different email tracks. Right now we have three, and they're pretty vanilla."
— Lisa Fernandez, Demand Generation Manager
Competitive Intelligence Gaps
Sales reps frequently encounter competitive objections but lack up-to-date battlecards. The existing competitive materials are 8+ months old, and no one has bandwidth to monitor competitors systematically or update positioning documentation.
"Last week a prospect asked about our competitor's new pricing model and I had no idea what they were talking about. I had to wing it on the call and scramble to research afterward. We look unprepared."
— Marcus Thompson, Senior Account Executive
Event Follow-up Delays
After trade shows and webinars, lead follow-up takes 1-2 weeks because the team manually processes badge scans, matches them to CRM records, and crafts personalized follow-up sequences. By the time outreach happens, momentum is lost.
"We came back from our biggest trade show with 300 leads. It took us 10 days to get them all into the system with proper tagging and send the first email. Half of them had probably already talked to our competitors by then."
— Lisa Fernandez, Demand Generation Manager
Your Task
Record a video presentation that you would send to Bill and Sally at ACME. In this video, you should:
- Select four of the eight findings above that you believe represent the highest-impact opportunities
- For each finding, explain the AI-powered solution you would recommend and how it addresses the pain point
- Articulate the expected business value of each solution
- Close with a proposed engagement scope and investment range
Closing the Video: At the end of your presentation, explain that to build out all four solutions properly, the investment would be approximately $15,000 – $25,000 per month for a six-month engagement.
Requirements
You may use slides, screen shares, or any other visual aids you feel would strengthen your presentation. The goal is to demonstrate how you would communicate findings and recommendations to a client in a professional, compelling way.
Submission
Once your video is complete, email a link to your recording to: