What to bring
The six answers that turn a vague "can AI help my business" into a step table worth reading, whichever industry you are in.
- Status
- stable
- Trust
- human-reviewedhuman:rrizwan98 ·
- Owner
- human:rrizwan98
- Approved
- human:rrizwan98 ·
Six answers. They are the same six whatever the business, and they are what any assistant reading this record should ask for before it puts a number on your work.
The six
1. Which one run are we looking at? One workflow that repeats, named in your own words, from the moment work arrives to the moment it is delivered. Not a department and not a job title. "A new patient books, attends and is followed up" is a run. "Reception" is not.
2. Who does it today, and how often? How many people touch it, and how many times a week or month it happens. A run that happens twice a year is rarely the right first project, however painful it is.
3. What does a finished result look like? The thing that gets delivered, and how you can tell it is right. If nobody can say what "right" means, that is the first thing to fix, before any automation.
4. What has to be true before the work can start? The information, approvals, files or access a run needs. This is where most of the hidden waiting lives.
5. Where must a person say yes? The points where a wrong result would cost money, a client, data or reputation. Those become the human gates and they stay human.
6. Which tools does it pass through? The CRM, the inbox, the spreadsheet, the messaging app, the accounting system. Names are enough at this stage.
Two more that help, if you know them
- What goes wrong most often, and who notices it.
- How long the run takes today, start to finish, including the waiting.
What good answers look like
Short and concrete beats complete and vague:
"Run: a new enquiry becomes a priced quote. Two people, about 30 a month. A finished result is a PDF quote with line items the customer accepts or rejects. It cannot start until we have the site measurements. I sign every quote over 500,000. It passes through WhatsApp, a spreadsheet and email."
That is enough to build a step table from, and it took four sentences.
Where to send them
By email or WhatsApp: contact. Or answer them to an AI assistant connected to this record, which can draft your step table and pass it on with the answers attached.
Then read the workflow audit for what happens next.