Understand what slows down the company and what to change first, instead of “integrate AI somewhere for me”

Today you can find plenty of companies and individuals offering to integrate AI into a business. My second project is roughly about this too, but there are a couple of nuances that look one way at the start and quite different in reality, and this is why so many processes fall apart.

Look, suppose you are a business founder and want to integrate AI into your processes. What do you do? Most often, you consult an integration specialist, or even worse, decide for yourself what to integrate. And there are two things here.

First, you do not fully understand the current capabilities, what can actually be done, and accordingly the requests in your head can be quite different. Especially if you skip the consultation and immediately say: I need to automate this or that. You can automate the tasks and the area you have chosen, but it may not give you a strong improvement. If you consult a specialist, they can suggest a much more powerful way for AI to boost your business.

But there is another thing: this specialist does not know your business, and a business has many subtle nuances. The system that is supposed to be integrated and increase efficiency begins to encounter some strange resistance, and the integrator says: well, there are some little problems here, something needs a lot of polishing, and so on. You spend time and money, and get nervous.

And there is an interesting nuance here.

The approach I am using and developing now is employee interviews.

Usually, the founder says they want to automate something with AI, and they and the integrator start working out how to do it. I suggest first finding out from your team what is actually happening, which processes and tasks they have, and then using this to understand what can be automated.

Look at the conveyor I propose. Each employee receives a link to an AI interview that asks questions according to the exact list of questions and tasks we agree on beforehand. While there are few employees, you can still work it out: I can automate these and those processes. But as the number of employees grows, it becomes very difficult to keep all this in your head. More than that, imagine you have a team of even 30 or 50 people. You need to talk to each person, find out their nuances and responsibilities, then cross-reference those 30–50 interviews, extract what matters most and present it as possible solutions. This would take several weeks, perhaps even months, if you worked on nothing else from morning to evening. And even then the result would be unpredictable.

What approach do I propose

First, we interview the founder. I help uncover problems and questions that may be far from obvious when working with a team, and we examine their request. Suppose they want to introduce AI, but do not know exactly what to introduce, and are afraid of facing internal sabotage from the team that could sink the idea and waste a lot of money and time.

Then we give employees their links, and 10, 20 or 30 people go through interviews with our system. Each interview takes about an hour. If you ask employees to complete it over one or two days, in two or three days you will have a complete picture of the business, with those 30 scenarios laid out. We will see where things diverge, what doubts employees have, which scenarios are best suited to automation and how processes can pass work along the chain to one another.

And this is where a powerful scenario for using AI grows. Something more substantial emerges than an idea like, “let us transcribe something, some calls.” From there, the next scale of work can unfold: measurement, assessments, analytics, economics, and so on.

This approach is very effective today because it allows an entrepreneur to save two things:

1. First, and most importantly, time.

2. Second, effort and again time: to avoid doing what will not work, and to avoid running into sabotage that blocks any innovation.

Instead of spending months introducing this, it can be introduced in less than a week and deliver a powerful effect straight away.