Field guide, 5 min read
What to bring to the first conversation
You do not need a specification or an AI use case. You need a constraint, the systems around it, and a sense of what a better result would change.
The first conversation works best when it starts from the operation, not from a technology. Here is what makes it productive.
Bring the constraint, not the solution
Describe what is slow, unreliable, invisible, or manual today, and what it costs when it goes wrong. It might be an integration that fails quietly, a report nobody trusts, a review queue that keeps growing, or an AI pilot that never reached production.
If you already have a solution in mind, bring it too. We will test it against the constraint rather than assume it.
Bring the systems and the people
List the applications, data sources, documents, and spreadsheets involved, and who owns each step. Most operational problems live in the handoffs between them.
If you can, bring one representative hard case: the order, document, or exception that shows where the work actually breaks.
Bring what a useful result would change
A first result might be a target architecture, a working integration, a governed data model, an operational dashboard, or a reviewed AI-assisted workflow. It does not need to transform the whole operation.
It does need an owner who can say what correct looks like, so the result can be measured against a baseline.