Measure the process before you automate it
On one engagement the pricing step took four minutes and everything around it took two and a half hours. We would have automated the wrong thing entirely. A week of timing beats a month of assuming.
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What we have learned building automation inside real businesses — including the parts that did not go to plan. No predictions, no think-pieces about the future of work.
Not the model, not the tooling. They fail because nobody wired up the retries, or the one person who understood the process left, or the API changed on a Tuesday and no alert fired. Here is the unglamorous checklist we run before calling anything finished.
On one engagement the pricing step took four minutes and everything around it took two and a half hours. We would have automated the wrong thing entirely. A week of timing beats a month of assuming.
The happy path is the easy twenty per cent. Idempotency, backoff, dead-letter handling and an alert that reaches a human — build those at the start and the system survives its first bad week.
We talk clients out of roughly one project in five. A spreadsheet that one person maintains happily is not a problem waiting to be solved — it is a solution that already fits.
Two hundred real tickets with known-good answers, run against every change before it ships. Without that you are not iterating, you are guessing and calling it iteration.
Support deflection is usually a documentation problem wearing an AI costume. On one project the jump from 41% to 62% came from rewriting eleven help articles, not from touching the model.
When two of your nine spreadsheets disagree about revenue, a model will be confidently wrong — which is worse than having no model. Fix the pipeline first. That is usually the whole project.
Day by day: who we sit with, what we time, which questions tend to surface the expensive answers, and what the costed roadmap contains at the end of it.
Roughly one quote in six goes to a human on the freight system we built. That is not a shortfall in the automation — it is the design decision that kept the error rate near zero.
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Most of what is written here came out of an audit. If you would like one run on your own operation, that is a thirty-minute conversation to start.