AI measured against the work it is meant to replace
We pick workflows where AI or automation can save real time, prepare the data, pilot against a baseline, and put controls in place for accuracy, privacy and cost before anything scales.
What an AI and automation engagement covers
Most engagements begin with an opportunity assessment and a single pilot. Nothing is rolled out widely until the pilot meets agreed measures.
A good fit when
- Staff spend hours re-typing information from invoices, forms or emails into other systems.
- Answers to routine questions are buried in policies, manuals or past tickets.
- Reports are assembled by hand from several spreadsheets every week or month.
- Teams already paste company data into public AI tools and you need a governed alternative.
What the work covers
- Opportunity assessment: current effort, data readiness, risk and value for candidate workflows.
- Internal assistants that retrieve from approved document sources, with citations and access controls.
- Document processing for forms, invoices and correspondence, with confidence thresholds and human review.
- Workflow automation connecting email, forms, approvals, CRM and ERP systems.
- Data preparation, dashboards and business intelligence reporting.
- Evaluation sets, usage policies, logging and cost monitoring.
What you receive
- D1Opportunity assessment and shortlist
- D2Pilot design with baseline and success measures
- D3Evaluation report on representative real cases
- D4Acceptable-use and data handling guidance
- D5Operating runbook covering monitoring, review queues and cost limits
What it depends on
- Access to representative documents or data, with permission to use them for testing.
- A process owner who can define correct outcomes and review exceptions.
- Decisions on which data may be processed by which AI services, and where.
- Integration access to the systems the workflow touches.
How an AI or automation engagement runs
STEP 01
Find the workflow
Measure effort, delay and errors in candidate processes, and score data readiness and risk.
D1Opportunity assessment
STEP 02
Prepare data
Collect representative examples, clean the sources and set access boundaries.
D2Data readiness notes
STEP 03
Pilot
Build the smallest useful version and run it alongside the current process.
D3Pilot build
STEP 04
Evaluate
Measure accuracy, time saved, review effort and cost on real cases, including the hard ones.
D4Evaluation report
STEP 05
Scale with controls
Roll out with monitoring, review queues, usage policies and cost alerts.
D5Operating runbook
Controls we put in place
- Grounding and citations
- Assistants answer from approved sources and show where each answer came from, so staff can check it.
- Human review where errors are costly
- Low-confidence extractions and sensitive actions go to a person before they reach a system of record.
- Access that follows permissions
- An assistant should never reveal a document the user could not open themselves.
- Evaluation before and after launch
- A fixed test set shows whether changes to prompts, models or data improve results or break them.
- Cost visibility
- Usage limits and monthly reports prevent surprise bills from AI services.
Common questions
Will our data be used to train public AI models?
That depends on the service and the plan. Business and API offerings from the major providers generally do not train on customer data by default, but terms differ and change. We check the terms of each service before any company data is processed.
How accurate is AI document processing?
It varies with document quality and layout. Clean, consistent forms can be extracted reliably; handwriting and poor scans need more review. The pilot measures accuracy on your own documents before you commit.
Should we fine-tune a model or use retrieval?
For answering questions from documents that change, retrieval is usually easier to maintain and audit. Fine-tuning suits a consistent style or a specialized task. The evaluation set helps decide.
Can AI connect to our CRM or ERP?
Yes, through their APIs. We start with read-only access and add narrowly defined actions that require confirmation, with every action logged.
Related guides and scenarios
Guides
Have a process that eats hours every week?
Describe it. We will tell you whether AI, simpler automation or a better form is the right fix.