Choosing your first AI workflow

A useful first AI project starts with a piece of work you can describe. Perhaps someone turns incoming enquiries into a brief, prepares a weekly report or finds information across a small collection of documents. The opportunity is easier to assess when you can point to the inputs, the next person in the process and the output that person needs.

Choose a handoff you can see.

Write the task in one sentence: “Given these inputs, prepare this output for this reviewer.” Keep the first boundary small. A report draft for a project lead is a clearer starting point than an ambition to transform every part of project management. You can still have a larger direction; the first step needs to be inspectable.

Ask the people doing the work where they lose time, repeat effort or wait for missing information. Look for a recurring task with examples you can access and someone willing to review the output. An infrequent task with ambiguous ownership can be harder to evaluate, even when the idea sounds exciting.

Record the starting position.

Before changing the process, observe how it works today. Record preparation time, the corrections a reviewer makes and the questions that remain unanswered. Choose measures that relate to the task, rather than counting how much text a tool produces. A quicker draft is only useful if reviewing and correcting it does not consume the time saved.

Keep a small set of representative examples. Include an ordinary case, incomplete information and a case with conflicting details. Agree what an acceptable output looks like for each. This gives the team something concrete to compare when the pilot is ready.

Design the review alongside the draft.

Decide who checks facts, which source material they can inspect and what happens when information is missing. The workflow should make an unresolved question visible. It should also give the reviewer a practical way to correct the output or send it back for clarification.

Think about access as part of the assessment. Which files are available, who may use them and which versions matter? A pilot built around a carefully prepared example may need more work before it can handle the material arriving in daily operations.

Test one useful loop.

Our construction workflow examples include preparing a report from agreed notes and updates. The proposed loop is simple: gather, prepare, review. The reviewer checks the draft against its sources before sharing it. These examples describe possible engagements; they are not claims of completed client deployments.

For an existing product you can inspect, explore Ridgeplate, our own property platform. Product evidence and a custom workflow pilot answer different questions. A working product shows something our team has made; your pilot still needs to demonstrate usefulness for your process.

Make the next decision explicit.

At the end, compare the examples with the baseline. Continue, revise or stop based on the findings. Document what worked, where the reviewer struggled and what a wider release would need. An assessment can help define that first scope; a pilot lets the team test it before committing to a larger build.