McLean Forrester Is Building the AI Foundation That Most Companies Are Missing

Artificial intelligence is everywhere right now, but for most organizations, the path from curiosity to real, working capability is still murky. The team at McLean Forrester has spent the last several months doing something about that, building products, refining service offerings, and working directly with clients to turn AI ambition into measurable results. In Episode 12 of the TechT Podcast, Heather and Larry McLean pulled back the curtain on what they have been working on, and it is worth paying attention to.
The Problem No One Wants to Talk About: Dirty Data
Before any AI system can do useful work, it needs reliable data to act on. That sounds obvious, but it is a step that organizations routinely skip or underestimate. The result is AI projects that fail quietly, not because the technology is flawed, but because the information feeding it is outdated, duplicated, or contradictory.
This is the problem that Unicorn IQ was built to solve. Developed in collaboration with a client who came to McLean Forrester with a bold vision, Unicorn IQ is an automated data hygiene engine that creates what the team calls an indexed source of truth. The engine ingests unstructured data, evaluates it against a defined benchmark of trusted information, and produces a clean, verified data store that AI tools can confidently act on.
The product is designed to plug into any existing pipeline and run continuously in the background, keeping data clean as an organization grows and changes. As Heather puts it, this is the necessary foundation to build upon whether you are making decisions, building AI capabilities, or pursuing automation of any kind. You simply cannot do any of that well without trusted data underneath it.
Unicorn IQ officially launched recently and is available at unicorniq.ai. It is not a concept or a prototype. It is a working product that is already delivering results.
From Clean Data to Smarter Sales
Built directly on top of the Unicorn IQ engine is a second product currently in development at McLean Forrester: a data-driven sales enablement and revenue generation platform designed for enterprise teams.
The concept behind it draws on the idea of the sales unicorn, that rare top performer whose instincts, relationships, and judgment seem impossible to replicate across an entire team. Every sales organization has one or two people who consistently outperform everyone else, and the challenge has always been how to take what makes them exceptional and spread it more broadly.
This platform aims to do exactly that. By capturing and analyzing the behaviors, data patterns, and approaches tied to top performance, it gives the rest of the team access to the same quality of insight. Details remain limited since the product has not yet been formally announced by the client, but the build is well underway and the potential is significant. It represents a direct extension of what Unicorn IQ started, moving from clean data to actionable intelligence that drives real revenue outcomes.
Helping Organizations Find Their AI Starting Point
For companies that know they should be doing something with AI but are not sure where to begin, McLean Forrester has built a structured process called the AI Value Path Sprint.
The challenge the sprint addresses is a familiar one. AI can genuinely help almost every organization, but the same generic approach does not work everywhere. Every company has different operations, different pain points, and different opportunities. Trying to force a standard AI solution onto a unique business context rarely delivers value, and it often creates frustration.
The AI Value Path Sprint starts with a discovery phase lasting roughly two to three weeks. During that time, the McLean Forrester team works closely with a client to map out their business operations, identify where the friction points are, and determine where AI could realistically make a difference. Those opportunities are then ranked by potential value, giving the organization a clear picture of where to focus first.
The second phase moves directly into prototyping. Within four weeks, the team builds a functioning proof of concept using the client's actual data. The goal is not a polished demo built on hypothetical scenarios. It is a working prototype that demonstrates real value in the client's real environment. That prototype then serves as the foundation for a full production build if the results justify moving forward, which they typically do.
The entire sprint is designed to be low cost and low risk. Rather than asking an organization to commit to a large engagement before they have seen anything work, the AI Value Path Sprint gets them to a tangible result quickly and lets the evidence make the case. More information is available at mcleanforrester.com.
Clearing the Infrastructure That Blocks Progress
Even organizations that are ready to invest in AI often hit a wall they did not anticipate: their existing infrastructure is simply too outdated to support what they want to build. Decades of accumulated legacy systems, technical debt, and redundant tools make it extremely difficult to move quickly or adopt modern platforms.
The Application Rationalization 360 offering from McLean Forrester addresses this directly. The process involves a thorough review of an organization's entire application portfolio, evaluating every system against the Gartner 5Rs framework to determine whether it should be retained, retired, replaced, rehosted, or refactored. The output is a practical roadmap that answers the hard questions about overlap, gaps, security exposure, and open-source risk across the whole portfolio.
The team is currently working with organizations in the Department of Defense as well as commercial clients, including one with over 100 legacy systems that need a credible modernization plan. The value here is not just efficiency. It is confidence. Organizations that complete the rationalization process know exactly where they stand and have a clear path forward.
Reaching More Industries Through the Impact Partner Program
One of the newer initiatives at McLean Forrester is the Impact Partner Program, launched a few months ago to help the team extend its reach across industries it might not otherwise have direct access to.
The reality of selling AI and modernization services is that every industry speaks its own language. Healthcare, defense, financial services, manufacturing, and retail each have their own processes, priorities, and pain points. The Impact Partner Program brings in professionals who are already deeply embedded in those sectors, people who understand the specific challenges their industry faces and can speak to them credibly.
Partners connect McLean Forrester with organizations that could benefit from their services, helping to bridge the gap between a company's specific needs and the solutions that actually fit. In return, partners become part of a growing network that is doing meaningful work around AI adoption and business modernization.
If you work in an industry where you see real demand for this kind of capability and want to get involved, you can find the full details and apply directly at mcleanforrester.com.
The Bigger Picture
What stands out across all of these projects is a consistent point of view. McLean Forrester is not selling AI as a concept. They are building specific tools and running structured processes that address the actual reasons AI projects fail: bad data, unclear starting points, outdated infrastructure, and a lack of industry context. Each offering they have developed targets one of those failure points directly.
For any organization that has been circling around AI adoption without finding a way in, the work coming out of McLean Forrester right now represents a practical and well-reasoned path forward.