AI for strategic planning
Ultramarine Work lives in the folder where your exports, models and past board packs already sit. It builds the market sizing and the business case, drafts the deck, and flags numbers it could not reconcile.
Q3-business-review.pptxExampleAsk it for
“Build the Q3 business review deck from the CRM, billing and plan files: ARR bridge, cohort NRR, churn, pipeline coverage and which metrics missed plan.”
Q3-business-review.pptx“Size the US market for outsourced clinical-trial billing bottom-up from trial starts, sites per trial and billing cost per site, with a source per input.”
Market-sizing.xlsx“Assemble the October board deck from the four function one-pagers and the CEO’s notes, with action titles that state the takeaway on every slide.”
October-board-deck.pptx“Fill in the capital request template for the $4.2M packaging line with the do-nothing baseline, options, NPV, IRR, payback, volume and ramp-timing sensitivity.”
Packaging-line-capital-request.docx“Rebuild the pocket-price waterfall for our top 40 distributors from the order export, walking the $9.10 list price down to pocket price, and rank the leaks.”
Pocket-price-waterfall.xlsx“Phase the FY27 headcount plan by team and start date at fully loaded cost, with employer tax wage-base caps, $18,000 of benefits per head and proration.”
FY27-headcount-plan.xlsx
How it works
- 1
Pull the planning folder together
The folder holds last year’s AOP and reforecast, the KPI dictionary, past board packs, the CRM and billing exports, the headcount model, expert-call notes and the competitor teardowns your team trusts.
- 2
Name the deliverable
Ask for the ARR bridge, the pocket-price waterfall or the October board deck. It builds the workbook with live formulas, works in your deck template when a past pack is in the folder, and names the file behind each number.
- 3
You review, then you decide
Check the assumptions, the storyline and the numbers the way you would check a new analyst’s draft. What to recommend, which trade-offs to accept and what the CEO hears in the room are your calls.
Inside the Strategy & Planning mode
Operating metrics and reviews
Builds the QBR and board operating packs, and computes the ARR bridge, cohort NRR, churn and pipeline coverage the way the KPI dictionary defines them.
Market sizing and evidence synthesis
Sizes TAM, SAM and SOM top-down and bottom-up, shows where the two disagree, cites a source for each input and flags anything no source supports.
Executive storyline and decks
Turns the function one-pagers and rough notes into a board pack with one governing message, action titles that state the takeaway, and an exhibit behind each.
Business case and capital allocation
Builds the do-nothing baseline first, then the options with NPV, IRR and payback, and shows which assumptions the case turns on.
Product and customer profitability
Bridges list price to pocket price account by account, layers in rebates and cost-to-serve, and names the accounts where the money leaks for Finance to test.
Headcount and workforce plan
Turns roles and start dates into a monthly plan with wage-base caps, per-head benefits, backfills and fully loaded cost by team and quarter.
Value creation and transformation
Breaks the 100-day plan into levers with one owner and one number each, keeps one-time gains out of run-rate and builds the benefits tracker FP&A can tie out.
- Office skills
- Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF
- Tools
- Read, edit and write files, Search files, Run code, Search and read the web, View images
- Connectors
- SharePoint, Google Drive, Gmail, and additional custom connectors
- House style
- Your fonts, layouts and rules, on every file
Who it’s for
In-house strategy, planning and business operations staff and offices of the CEO, who produce the analysis and plans behind company decisions.
Questions
Our board pack contains unreleased results. Where does the data go?
Ultramarine Work changes files only in the project’s folder. When a request needs it, it can read files elsewhere on your computer, never passwords, keys or app data, and you can turn that off in settings. The model runs on Paper Instruments’ servers, so the content it works on is sent there to be processed. Paper Instruments is SOC 2 Type II, and our security and compliance details are on our compliance page. Your compliance team decides whether a board pack may go in.
Can I trust the market numbers, or will it invent them?
It sizes the market from the documents, exports and filings in the folder, puts a source on every input and flags anything it cannot reconcile instead of guessing a figure. That alone does not make the headline number right. AI sizing routinely returns TAMs off by tens of billions and citations to reports that do not exist, so the team owns the checks. Read the sources behind the inputs, and test what your company can actually win before you label anything SOM.
How do I know the competitor list is real?
The competitor picture comes from the filings, teardowns, expert-call notes and web pages you point it to, and it names a source for each claim and marks what it cannot verify. Invented competitors and wrong pricing are the two errors reviewers catch most often. Before anything reaches a board pack, check pricing and headcount claims against live pages and filings.
Will it compute metrics the way our KPI dictionary defines them?
Yes, when the dictionary is in the folder. Tell it to compute NRR, pipeline coverage or churn by the definitions there, and it applies those formulas and tells you which file each number came from. Where a measure is undefined, it will say so rather than pick a definition for you, because that fight is yours to have.
Does it replace the strategy team or write the plan?
No, it drafts the models, decks and trackers, and the plan stays yours. Entering a market, cutting a product line or funding the packaging line is a judgment the CEO should hear from a person, and someone on your team decides what survives into the AOP.