Consulting / Automation Discovery Workflow
Automation Discovery Workflow
Start with the workflow pain. Build only as much AI as the work requires.
This is how we decide whether a piece of work needs a reusable prompt, a repeatable skill, a connection to your systems, memory, an actual agent, or just a written-down process.
The rule
Do not start by asking whether something should be an agent. Start with how the work actually moves, find what is holding it up, decide where a person has to stay in charge, and measure what changed.
The workflow ladder, as a decision map.
Start with the work in front of you and follow the questions down until it lands on the right-sized answer: a prompt, a skill, a connected workflow, memory, an agent, or a process.
Right-sized automation
Climb only as high as the job requires.
This keeps AI work honest. Some problems need a reusable prompt. Some need a workflow pack. Some need live access to your systems, or memory. Only some deserve an agent.
- Prompt Pattern — a reusable instruction, intake template, review checklist, or message structure.
- Skill — repeatable steps, examples, quality control, and a person who owns the decision.
- Connector Workflow — live email, calendar, CRM, files, database or application actions.
- Vector Memory — searchable policy, contract, history, evidence, playbook or case memory.
- Human-Guided Workflow — the system helps, a person still makes the call.
- Agent Candidate — a named role with tools, memory, permissions, escalation rules and tests.
- Operating Process — a documented owner, a metric, a cadence, an audit trail.
- Simple Automation — a script, form, report, macro, scheduled job or workflow rule.
What this prevents
Decide before the budget and the vendor decide for you.
This gives a team a clear way to size up the work before anyone picks the technology. It stops you overbuilding, underbuilding, and treating every workflow problem as an agent problem.
What comes out the other side is a business process you can run, measure, improve and stand behind.
What should improve
- Time — where should the work get faster?
- Accuracy — where should there be fewer misses and less rework?
- Auditability — where should it be easier to show what happened?
- Cost — where should waste, tool sprawl or unnecessary labor drop?
- Capacity — where should the same team handle more without chaos?
Run one workflow through the ladder.
Bring the one that is slow, risky, confusing or overloaded. We will help you find the smallest thing that would actually fix it, and the number that should move.