Department for Business & Trade · AI Capability Programme
Proof in 90 days,
not promises in 24 months.
Zühlke's response to ITT DBT/2026/AI-CAP/ITT-003 — building the skills, governance and culture to use AI well across 3,200 people.
Team 02 · Two phases · 24 months · £7.5M
What you actually asked for
Capability, not a catalogue.
- ~3,200 staff · 14 UK offices · 8 overseas posts
- Two phases over 24 months — £7.5M
- Not a tools purchase: skills, governance, culture
- Measurable proof by Dec 2026; the annual report, April 2027
But you have been here before
£2.2M. A previous programme. It evaporated.
Activity is not
capability.
That programme was competently run — facilitation scored 7.9/10. It didn't fail through effort. It failed structurally. That distinction shapes everything we propose.
Your own review named five reasons
Why it didn't stick.
- Training sat alongside the work, not inside it
- Senior leaders didn't show up (~12% director attendance)
- A 180-module catalogue — too broad to be relevant
- No consequence for opting out
- Champions volunteered, unfunded, unsupported — the network collapsed on exit
So we built the structural opposite
Three commitments, each a fix for a named failure.
Embed in the work
We redesign real workflows from the inside — capability built into how the task is done, never standalone training.
Govern as we go
Governance grows from the live use cases teams actually run — so it's usable, and used. We adopt and tailor the AI Playbook, not a shelf document.
Design our exit
Named DBT owners, a funded community of practice, a month-18 sustainability gate. What we build survives us.
The commitment most suppliers won't make
We tie our fee to change that lasts.
Meridian was paid for a catalogue. We're asking to be paid for behaviour that's still there after we leave. We set a baseline in the first weeks — then a slice of our Phase 2 fee, and the decision to continue, ride on adoption that persists.
If the change isn't real, you shouldn't pay us as though it were.
Phase 1 · Foundation · months 1–6 · ~£1.5M
Proof in 90 days. Diagnose before we prescribe.
Mobilise. Lock in Director-level sponsors. Set the baseline — you can't prove value without it.
Refresh your 2022 segmentation. Discovery across directorates. A shadow-AI audit — surfacing real risk and real value.
A governance framework people actually follow, and live lighthouse pilots in the directorates that want it.
Deliverables expressed as outcomes, not documents. A clear go / no-go at month 6 — you are not locked in.
Phase 2 · Delivery · months 7–24 · ~£6.0M
Scale only what Phase 1 proved.
- Embedded squads — joint Zühlke + DBT pairs redesign real workflows in situ
- A community of practice with a funded coordinator, protected time, self-selected champions
- Exit by design — a named owner per workstream; a month-18 sustainability gate
- Governance matures with use; outcomes measured six-monthly
We start where the energy is
The willing first. The sceptics last.
Investment and your data analysts go first — that's where proof comes fastest. We approach Trade Policy and Legal last, on their terms: accuracy-first, the human expert always in the loop.
We treat the 2024 Legal incident as the reason to be careful everywhere — not a footnote.
We know the landscape as it is today
Current. And you're not alone.
- We build on the government's AI Playbook (Feb 2025) — not a framework we invent
- We learn from what works: Consult analysed 50,000 responses in ~2 hours; Caddy ~halved response times
- The Public Accounts Committee: ~70% of departments struggle for AI skills
You're facing a national challenge — with a method to answer it.
Proof you can see — not discovered at the end
What's different by December 2026.
Sustained active use in named teams, against a baseline, on a live dashboard. Dashed line = where you started.
Built into delivery, not bolted on
Social value that's specific.
- Apprenticeships & early-careers hiring near your 14 UK offices
- A remote-first, low-carbon programme with a Carbon Reduction Plan
- Deliberately bring the 54% with least confidence along — no two-tier department
- Augment, not replace — an honest promise to staff, made with the unions
PPN 06/20 themes answered; framed to PPN 002 and the Procurement Act 2023.
Practitioners who've sat in government
A team that tapers.
Not AI experts seeing a department for the first time — people who understand how a large, policy-heavy organisation actually changes.
Programme & Delivery · Engagement · Technical & Data · Discovery & Measurement · Capability & Engineering · Enablement & Tooling
The team shrinks as your capability grows. We get cheaper as you get better.
A partner you can trust names them first
We'll name the hard things.
- Staff resistance — Trade Policy and Legal especially
- Union concerns if AI reads as job cuts
- Whether Director-level sponsorship really materialises
- Even the ways our own fee-at-risk model could be tested
They're written down, with mitigations — because the risks that sink programmes are the ones nobody said out loud.
The test we're happy to be judged on
We get cheaper as you get better.
In twelve months: named teams doing real work measurably better — and still doing it after we've gone. That's the opposite of the dependency you've paid for before. That's the partnership we're offering.
Zühlke. Team 02 · DBT AI Capability Programme