Insights
Guides for the decisions in front of you.
All insights
- Guide
Guide
Fund first
A four-question test
Which AI use case should you fund first?
Score each candidate on how often it happens, how much judgment it needs, where its inputs come from and how you'd measure it. Fund the one that passes.
Point of viewWhy does your back office grow faster than your revenue?
Every new order adds admin, so finance and ops headcount grows with volume. How to find work that scales per unit, measure it and automate it first.
Point of viewCan you run AI without a data team?
Yes, with four things in place: an owner for the process, access to the systems, a weekly review of the output and someone to call when it breaks.
GuideWhat decides the cost of an AI project?
Four things set what an AI project costs: the systems it connects, the exceptions it handles, the testing it needs and running it. You shape three of them.
GuideHow do you triage support requests automatically?
How automatic triage works in a support inbox: sort each request, attach the order or account, route it to a lane and draft a reply for an agent to send.
- Guide
Guide
Rule or agent
A one-line test for each step
AI agents or workflow automation: which does your process need?
What separates workflow automation from an AI agent, a one-line test for each step of a process, and why most useful first systems use both.
GuideHow do you keep AI secure and compliant without a security team?
For companies with a small IT team: control what AI can see, who can use it and what gets logged, and answer customer security questionnaires with confidence.
- Guide
Guide
Invoices, matched
And the exceptions, routed
How do you automate invoice processing, and what happens to the exceptions?
What automated invoice processing does step by step, where your team stays involved, how to handle invoices that don't match, and what to measure.
- Guide
Guide
Did it pay?
One measure, before and after
How do you measure the ROI of an AI project?
Pick one measure, read it before anything is built and again after launch, the same way. What to count on each side, and what to do if it doesn't move.
- Point of view
Point of view
Key-person risk
When the spreadsheet owner leaves
What happens to your processes when the person who runs them leaves?
Critical processes often live in one person's spreadsheets and memory. How to find them, write them down and move the rules into a system a team owns.
GuideHow do you stop re-keying data between your CRM, ERP and other systems?
Why the same customer gets typed into three systems, what it costs, and how to connect them so a change in one place shows up in the others.
Point of viewDo you need to fix your data before you automate?
You don't need a company-wide clean-up. You need reliable inputs to the one process you automate first. How to check them, and what to fix.
- Guide
Guide
Team adoption
Make the new way the easy way
How do you get your team to use a new AI system?
Whether your team uses an AI system is mostly decided before launch. How to choose the work, build it with them and make the new way the easy way.
- Guide
Guide
Before you sign
Nine questions for a partner
What should you ask an AI partner before you sign?
Nine questions to put to any AI partner before you sign, what a good answer sounds like, and the three answers that decide whether to carry on.
GuideHow do you process customer orders that arrive by email and PDF?
How to turn purchase orders that arrive as email attachments into orders in your ERP without re-keying, and what happens when the system isn't sure.