Doing Copilot is not an AI strategy.
From cloud foundations to actionable insight, here's what one actually looks like.
Rolling out Microsoft Copilot is a sensible first step. But it isn't a strategy. Real AI value, the kind that moves business KPIs, comes from the work underneath: a clear roadmap, a modern data platform, governed & secure data, and AI that's built around your business. That's where most organisations need a partner. It's also where we live.
At element61, we think with you, build with you, and anchor results in your organisation.
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LAYER 1 & 2 · STRATEGY + FOUNDATION
Data & Analytics Roadmap A focused engagement with your leadership team. Current state, a platform & architecture review, business priorities, and a sequenced plan with clear quick wins. Typically 4 to 8 weeks |
LAYER 3 · TRUST
Data Governance Quick Scan Where does your governance stand today? We benchmark your catalog, quality, stewardship and AI-readiness against good practice, and map the priority gaps. Typically 2 to 3 weeks |
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LAYER 3 · TRUST
Data Security & AI Exposure Assessment Where is sensitive data flowing when your people use Copilot and other AI tools? A focused review of shadow AI, DLP posture, and sensitivity labelling. Typically 4 to 6 weeks |
LAYER 4 · VALUE
AI Use Case Sprint A hands-on sprint to prove or disprove a specific AI use case. Business framing, rapid prototyping, and a go/no-go recommendation backed by real data. Typically 4 to 6 weeks |
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LAYER 4 · VALUE
AI Adoption Framework You have your first AI use case. Now what? We help you structure the adoption, identify the use cases that deliver real impact, and measure the return. Typically 3 to 4 weeks |
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Not sure which one fits? Tell us in the form below and we'll suggest the best starting point.
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From ambition to AI in production: the four layers
The organisations that get furthest with Data & AI aren't the ones with the biggest AI budget. They're the ones who built the layers underneath in the right order. Foundation first. Trust next. Value on top. Each layer enables the one above it. Skip a layer and the whole stack wobbles.
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Layer I · Strategy
Data & Analytics Roadmap |
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Layer II · Foundation
Modern Data Platform · Master Data Management |
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Layer III · Trust
Data Governance · AI Governance · Data Security |
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Layer IV · Value
Business Intelligence · Conversational BI · Data Science · Artificial Intelligence |
Layer I · Strategy
Most organisations don't need more technology. They need a clear plan: which technology, in what order, for which business outcome. That's why nine out of ten of our customer engagements start with a roadmap.
▸01 Data & Analytics Roadmap
Our Data & Analytics Roadmap is one of our most-value added engagements. We've completed more than 200 of them, and they typically run as a focused 4-to-8 week exercise with your leadership team. We assess your current state, map your business priorities to a sequenced set of initiatives, and deliver a clear, phased plan with the dependencies, investments and quick wins to make it real.
The output isn't a strategy deck that sits on SharePoint. It's a jointly-built, living plan with named owners, quarterly milestones, and a business case for every step.
Bart Van Der Vurst
PARTNER · ANALYTICS & AI ADVISORY
"With over 200 roadmaps under our belt, we've learned what makes them stick. A clear direction and organisational buy-in is key for successful data initiatives"
Layer 2 · Foundation
Every analytics and AI capability rests on a foundation: a platform that scales from a first dashboard to enterprise-wide AI, and master data that means the same thing in every system. We design and deliver both, with opinionated blueprints from real customer deployments.
▸02 Modern Data Platform
We build modern, cloud-native data platforms on Azure, Microsoft Fabric & Databricks. Lakehouse principles, medallion architecture, clean separation of storage & compute, and the engineering practices to operate it without burning out a small team.
The modern data platform handles both structured and unstructured data and provides a stable foundation to build new data products.
We don't just hand it over: we co-develop with your engineers and analysts, transferring methodology and best practices so your team owns it from day one.
▸03 Master Data Management
Most "data problems" turn out to be master data problems. Three systems with three versions of the customer. Products that change SKU between divisions. Manual hierarchies being maintained in Excel. Every report, dashboard, and AI model built on top inherits the confusion.
We help organisations unify their core entities (customers, products, materials, suppliers) with the right data models, stewardship workflows and operating model to keep master data actually master over time.
Brecht Vanhee
PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT · DELIVERY LEAD
"A good data platform doesn't store data, it makes it available to the organisation. It removes friction for every team that builds on top of it. Get the foundation right and everything above it gets easier."
"A platform without governance is a liability. Governance without a platform is a PowerPoint. You need both, and they need to talk to each other."
Layer 3 · Trust
Once the platform is live and the data is flowing, the next question is whether the organisation can trust it, scale it, and safely build AI on top. This is the layer most organisations underinvest in. The ones who get it right ship faster than everyone else, because the guardrails are already in place.
▸04 Data Governance
Modern data governance is operational, not bureaucratic. We help organisations stand up the operating model, the stewardship workflows, the data quality framework and the catalog & lineage approaches that make data trustworthy in practice. We start with the domains that matter most and grow from there.
As organisations move toward AI, governance evolves. The question shifts from "what data do we have?" to "what do our concepts mean?". We help our customers build that semantic backbone (business glossaries, concept hierarchies, ontologies) so that humans and AI agents reason over the same definitions.
▸05 AI Governance
Data governance tells you whether the data is trustworthy. AI governance tells you whether what you build on top is trustworthy. Two different questions, and increasingly two different practices.
We help our customers build the governance framework around their AI portfolio: model risk management, responsible AI translated into operational checkpoints, AI-readiness assessments, and (for agentic AI) the boundaries and observability that let the organisation trust agents to act on its behalf. When the framework is clear, teams ship faster, because legal, risk & procurement have the evidence they need to say yes.
▸06 Data Security
We embed security into the fabric of the platform: row-level & column-level access, sensitivity labelling that flows from source through to reports & models, and DLP that protects without blocking legitimate work. Calibrated protection, not maximum restriction.
Copilot and other generative AI tools change the threat model. Every prompt is a potential data leak. Our Data Security Posture Management approach gives you visibility into how AI is actually being used: which sensitive documents are being fed into which tools, where shadow AI is running, and what your real exposure is. You can't protect what you can't see.
Tom Bouten
DIRECTOR · DATA & AI GOVERNANCE
"Building trust isn't a slowdown. Done right, it's what lets the organisation move faster, because ambiguity, risk and security stop being the bottleneck."
Layer 4 · Value
This is where the investment earns its return. Reporting people actually use. Models that shape decisions. AI that ships. With the layers below in place, capabilities start to compound: the third use case costs less than the second, the tenth less than the third.
▸07 Business Intelligence
BI remains the discipline that turns raw data into the numbers people use to run the business every day. We design and deliver BI programs that stand the test of time: a single governed semantic layer, well-architected data models, role-based dashboards from exec to analyst, and the self-service capabilities that let business users answer their own questions.
It's also the grounding layer that every AI capability depends on. A trustworthy semantic model is what makes a copilot answer reliably instead of plausibly.
▸08 Conversational BI
Traditional BI delivers dashboards. Conversational BI delivers answers. Business users ask questions in their own language and get trustworthy, governed responses, grounded in the semantic model rather than hallucinated.
We build Conversational BI on Microsoft Fabric Data Agents, Power BI Copilot, Qlik Answers and the Qlik MCP Server, with the governance & security to make it production-ready, not just a demo.
▸09 Data Science
We're not building AI because we can. We build it because it has a real business impact, and we always look for the simplest path to value. Forecasting that influences inventory. Segmentation that reshapes marketing spend. Predictive maintenance that drives work orders.
Our Data Science approach is structured around problem framing rooted in business economics, MLOps that makes retraining routine, and integration into the processes where decisions actually happen. The models only matter when they move a number that someone cares about.
▸10 Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI use cases. Retrieval-augmented assistants. Intelligent document processing. And, increasingly, autonomous agents that execute multi-step workflows: processing orders, triaging tickets, reconciling data, orchestrating approvals.
The real challenge isn't building a single agent. It's building the operating system around them. Our Agentic OS brings the orchestration, guardrails, observability, cost controls and human-in-the-loop patterns that turn promising experiments into trustworthy capabilities running in production.
And around it all sits our AI Factory: a structured way of working that brings together clean data, the right technology, skilled users and responsible governance to scale AI across teams & domains. Not one project at a time, but a portfolio that compounds.
Peter Depypere
PARTNER · DATA SCIENCE & ANALYSIS
"We're not building AI because we can. We build it because it has a real business impact."
Where are you in this journey?
Maybe you're at the beginning, looking for that first roadmap. Maybe your platform is live, but the trust layer is thin. Maybe Copilot is deployed, and the board thinks the AI strategy is done, but you know the output is suffering from wonky foundations. Every organisation we work with is somewhere on this journey. Almost none are exactly where they think they are.
Let's start with a conversation, let's talk about your current place in the journey, and let us bring you some insights from the market.
Leave your details below, and we'll be in touch.