The business wants AI. You sign off on the architecture.
Business teams want the AI. You vet the implementation. Ward starts read-only, runs on policy, and hands you every artifact you need before signature: architecture, contracts, and references, all on the table.
Pulled Store 37’s last 28 days against the chain baseline. Two compounding causes.
labor_efficiency | Revenue per labor hour −22%, staffing miss at the 11a–1p peak |
|---|---|
promo.lift | BOGO crackers cannibalised Brand Y −28%, net category only +6% |
Vendor C billed above the active price list. The overage is recoverable.
invoice.line | 1,200 units at $4.28; contract clause 3.2(b) sets $4.12 |
|---|---|
dispute.amount | $0.16 per unit, $192 total, classified as off-contract pricing |
Nine SKU-store pairs cross the predicted-zero threshold inside 48 hours. Store 22 produce is the most urgent.
forecast.daily | Lettuce at Store 22: 84 units/day against 38 on hand, zero by 11a Thursday |
|---|---|
supplier.lead | Regional DC lead time 18 hours, no sufficient PO already in transit |
Three stores in the ten-store cluster breach the 2% threshold on one SKU. The cause is upstream, not theft.
shrink.rate | Stores 4, 11, 19 at 2.4–3.1% against a 1.2% cluster baseline |
|---|---|
delivery.defect | All three take delivery from the same lane, defect rate 4.8% above goal |
What lands on your desk
when the business buys AI.
The business wants AI. You sign off on the architecture.
Business sponsor already chose the vendor. You inherit the security review
Every AI vendor wants write access and a copy of the production data
Model lock-in means rewriting the stack when GPT or Claude moves again
Audit trail is an afterthought. Compliance has nothing to pull on
Data lake project keeps getting bumped for the next thing the business wants
Source: Gartner
How Ward earns
the sign-off.
- ×Business sponsor already chose the vendor. You inherit the security review
- ×Every AI vendor wants write access and a copy of the production data
- ×Model lock-in means rewriting the stack when GPT or Claude moves again
- ×Audit trail is an afterthought. Compliance has nothing to pull on
- ✓Federated query: data stays in your warehouse. No copies, no shadow lake
- ✓Read-only credentials. Cedar policies enforce least-privilege per agent
- ✓LLM-agnostic. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama. Bring your own keys
- ✓Every query, every model, every source logged. SIEM-ready audit output
Federated query: data stays in your warehouse. No copies, no shadow lake
Read-only credentials. Cedar policies enforce least-privilege per agent
LLM-agnostic. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama. Bring your own keys
Every query, every model, every source logged. SIEM-ready audit output
VPC peering, PrivateLink, SOC 2 II. Your security review is short
From signature
to running insights.
A live pilot for IT leaders hits these milestones on real data, on a fixed-fee schedule.
What runs where. Who can touch what.
Federated query. Read-only credentials. Cedar policies enforce least-privilege. Full audit trail per query. No data leaves your warehouse. The business gets the insights. You keep production safe.
Ward queries Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres, and SAP HANA in place, with no ETL into a Ward-owned database and no second copy, so data residency is unchanged.
Service accounts are locked to SELECT. Cedar policies enforce per-agent, per-resource scope. Agents cannot mutate the data they reason over.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama. Bring your own keys, route per task. Switch models without rewriting the stack. No vendor lock-in at the model layer.
Every query, every source, every model call, every reasoning step logged. SIEM-ready output. Compliance has a thread to pull on for any insight.
VPC peering, PrivateLink, IP allowlist. Single-tenant deploy in your AWS, Azure, or GCP if your security posture requires it.
SAML/OIDC SSO. SCIM provisioning. Role-based access tied to your IdP groups. No shadow user store. Offboarding flows through your existing process.
The product your
business teams will use.
Dashboards
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries.
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
sap_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_shrinkage | import | 2m ago |
sap_labor_scheduling | import | 14m ago |
retail_inventory_weekly | import | 1h ago |
retail_google_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_meta_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_ga4_website_daily | import | 1h ago |
Architecture
Two ways to connect. Federate against your live systems, or ingest into Ward’s data lake. Toggle below.
sap.posretail.inventory_weeklyPolicies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
finance-read-shrinkage | permit | Model::"inventory_shrinkage" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
region-west-only | permit | Tenant::"acme" |
Architecture packet: data flow diagram, Cedar policy bundle, SOC 2 II report, sub-processor list, network topology. Read-only by default. SIEM-ready logs. Available before the pilot starts.
What the business teams
get, and what it runs on.
Retail verticals
Insight typesThe first three are where this role usually starts.
Platform pieces this role leans on
Systems Ward connects toRead-only by default.
Operator stories
and the alternatives.
You have read why. The rest of it is what happens next.
Everything above argues that this is worth your attention. The CIO path assumes you agree and answers the questions you actually have: what connects in which week, what you personally sign off at each of the six gates, and what to hand the four people who will ask you to justify it.
What it costs, and when you know if it worked.
Read-only for the first six weeks. A measured KPI delta by day 90, whichever way it goes.
-
48 hoursFirst insight cards
From a read-only connection. Findings on your own data, not a sandbox and not a slide.
-
Week 2Findings ranked by dollars
Stores, SKUs and vendors ranked by what they cost you, with the cause named and the SQL one click under every number.
-
Week 6First gated write
One playbook, one system of record, blocked on an approver role you named. Everything before this is read-only.
-
Day 90The number, either way
Measured KPI delta against the metric agreed on day one. If it did not move, the pilot ends.
Tier follows stack complexity: how many systems have to talk to each other, how many brands you run, and how custom your schema is. Not headcount, and not revenue.
- Month-to-month, 30 days notice
- No rollover clause
- Every tier is the full platform
Two ways to start.
Run a read-only proof on your stack, or have advisory walk you through architecture.
Playbooks for Technology.
The playbooks this team runs on Ward.
Control AI spend by department and user.
Without skimping on the outcome.
Give every department and every user a compute budget. Ward routes each question to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar, so finance caps the spend without capping what the business gets back.
Evaluating this for a retail IT estate? The six-week onboarding path sets out what connects each week and what you sign off at every gate, and the evaluation packet is built to forward to security and procurement.
The business wants AI. You sign off on the architecture.
Architecture review, MSA, DPA, SOC 2 II report, on the table before you sign.
Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.