# A structured roadmap for AI in a regulated contract research organisation

> A global specialist contract research organisation · SaaS & Tech

A global specialist contract research organisation carried heavy manual overhead across finance, proposals and reporting, with no structured way to identify where AI could help. QuantSpark delivered a four-week discovery that produced a ranked, governance-aware roadmap of prioritised AI opportunities.

## At a glance

- Engagement: 4 weeks

## What was the problem?

The client is a global specialist contract research organisation accelerating therapy development for biotech innovators, operating in a heavily regulated environment with significant overhead tied to manual processes. Heavy manual workflows spanned finance forecasting, proposals, mobilisation and reporting across fragmented systems, with many projects still run in spreadsheets. Senior finance and operations time was consumed by low-value data wrangling, forecast-versus-actual variance was only partly visible, and the commercial-to-operations handoff lost proposal assumptions after award. There was clear appetite for AI but no structured approach to identifying where to deploy it.

## What did QuantSpark do?

QuantSpark delivered a four-week accelerated AI discovery across three phases: discovery, opportunity evaluation and value-plan delivery. The work combined stakeholder interviews, business-process mapping and hypothesis-driven analysis, scoring each use case on desirability, feasibility and defensibility, with governance framing throughout to suit a regulated environment. The output was a ranked register of prioritised AI opportunities mapped to a three-horizon roadmap, alongside board-ready business cases, wireframes and an interactive proof of concept.

## What changed?

The engagement delivered a prioritised, governance-aware roadmap led by five opportunities: an enterprise data-consolidation and project-intelligence layer; an assistant that drafts first-pass proposals from incoming client requests; forecast-consolidation automation; a commercial-to-operations handoff pack; and project-profitability and contract-burn intelligence. This was advisory work: no hard ROI was measured, and the value is expressed qualitatively as time saved, margin protection, faster proposals and better board visibility. Any productivity or margin benefits are indicative and projected, not measured.

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