5 posts tagged with "workflow-design"

An AI pilot is not an operating plan.

It is a container. It tells us that a company intends to try some technology for a limited period. It does not tell us which work will change, who will do less of it, where judgment will remain, or how anyone will know the trial helped.

That missing statement is the operating thesis.

A useful operating thesis sounds like this: routine order-status calls can be handled from approved facts and documented automatically, while exceptions arrive in front of an experienced CSR with the context required to act.

That can be tested. It names the work, the boundary, the human role, and the expected change. "We are piloting an AI phone agent" names a technology and leaves the operation blank.

Most organizations do not have an AI problem.

They have work that waits too long, moves through too many hands, depends on one person's memory, repeats without getting easier, or breaks whenever the usual workaround stops working.

There is a particular trap technical people fall into when a problem is still fuzzy. We start collecting tools.

A lot of agent work starts by staring at the wrong object: the model call. The prompt, the reasoning trace, the tool call, and the autonomous loop all look like the product because they are the visible trick. They are not nothing. But in a professional setting, they are only one part of the thing someone can actually use.

"We probably need to hire someone for this." Every founder has said it. Whether it's a major new account, investor pressure to scale, or simply reaching the limits of your own bandwidth after an 85-hour week, the instinct is immediate: throw headcount at the problem. This is the founder's trap. You confuse activity with progress and hope that a new salary will magically organize the chaos. But hiring under pressure without a defined process is just institutionalizing your dysfunction. You aren't scaling a business; you're scaling a mess.