The questions
The questions are public. What The River Group sells is how completely your team answers them.
Crossing the distance between faster at the work you have and different work takes decisions that are not technology decisions. Here they are, in the order they get asked.
Which of your work can agents already take on? Before you decide how far to go, decide where to look. Take one operation you run and are measured on, and ask four things about the work inside it. Is the volume high, and not going down? Do the steps repeat? Is the information needed scattered across several systems? Is most of the day spent reading things, looking things up and applying rules, with judgment saved for the exceptions? One test sits under all four: could a well-briefed new hire do most of this by reading documents, searching systems and following rules, with a supervisor handling the hard cases? The more often that is yes, the more of this work agents can already take on.
That tells you where to look. It does not tell you how far to go, and reading it that way is the most common mistake made with it. Work agents can already take on, plus a limit that sits in the steps themselves, is a legitimate and aggressive retrofit.
Does this work need the same operating logic faster, or a different operating logic at a different shape? This is the diagnostic, and it's asked about one piece of work at a time, never about the company. Same logic faster is a retrofit. A different shape is a reimagine. The answer is allowed to differ from one function to the next, and it usually does.
Which work are you willing to reorganize? Not which work could be automated; that list is long and getting longer. Which work you would let be rebuilt around what humans and agents can do together, with the roles inside it redrawn, and which work you would leave as it is, and why.
How far do you take it this year? A position on the spectrum, for this work, for this year, rather than a target for the whole company. No rule sets it, and neither end is safe: retrofit cedes ground quietly and reimagine can collapse under its own ambition. A position is taken by argument, with the people who own the outcome, and it's defensible when someone has argued against it and lost.
Who owns the outcome when you do? One person, with a number on it. An agent cannot own an outcome, and a program office cannot either. If the answer is a committee, the position is still open.
How will you know when the position you took has gone stale? Every position goes stale, because agentic capability keeps advancing and the right position moves with it. The question is what mechanism you have for noticing, and for moving when it has. That is the watch, and it is the part most companies skip.
What the questions leave to you. The position itself. Two of them have only a defensible answer, never a right one. There are functions and industries where retrofitting is the correct answer, full stop, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What the questions do is make the disagreement visible early, between the people who own the outcome, instead of late, in the numbers.
Once you have answered them, what tells you when an answer has gone stale? That is the watch.