Forget the shiny demos: a 90-day AI playbook for Operations
Tools don't create value. Fixing real work does. This 90-day operating model focuses on pain your teams feel every day, sets clear guardrails and ships outcomes weekly.
The goal is simple: fewer idle pilots, cleaner reporting to leadership and compounding time returned to the business.
Start with a narrow bet
Pick three to five use cases with real queues of pain. Think reporting, data entry, proposals, approvals or any repetitive workflow with quality or delay issues.
Favor hosted, configurable tools first. Operations might test reporting accelerators, HR can trial résumé screeners, finance can pilot invoice summarizers and sales can try proposal generators. The point is proof in live workflows, not the tool.
Week 1: listen, measure, define
Run a listening tour. Sit with the people doing the work. Time the steps. Capture friction in their words. Ask three questions: What slows you down? What do you do twice? What would you stop doing if you could?
For each process, document:
- Task description: Plain language, no jargon.
- Baseline measures: Minutes or hours, error rates, backlog counts.
- Pain points: Entered by users, not observers.
- Data sources: Origin, owner, refresh frequency.
- Criticality: Revenue, compliance, customer, or internal efficiency impact.
- Owner: Named leader accountable for outcomes.
End the week with a one-pager per use case: the problem, baseline, target metric, and the business owner who stands behind it.
Week 2: set constraints that scale
Classify data at the source. Log prompts and outputs. Keep humans in the loop for anything that touches financial or operational outcomes. Shortlist hosted tools that provide exportable data, clear pricing and basic security assurances.
If you need a governance reference, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework is a practical starting point.
Weeks 3-9: ship weekly, stop what stalls
- Monday (20 minutes): Portfolio standup. Each owner reports one number: hours saved or errors avoided last week. Two weeks at zero? Stop the work.
- Midweek: Configure or tune tools, adjust prompts, test connectors, trial add-ons.
- Friday: Sit with users. Watch the tool in action. Capture where it helps and where it gets in the way.
Prioritize by reach, impact, confidence and effort. Drop anything that requires data you cannot legally or ethically use. Prefer steps that remove manual work over features that add complexity. Build platforms only after hosted tools hit limits.
Fund like a product, not a science fair
- Foundations: Identity, data access, observability, policy enforcement.
- Trials: Out-of-the-box tools, capped at four weeks.
- Scale-ups: Only after value is proven in production workflows.
Rules: no scale-up without an owner, a measure and a rollback plan. Track subscriptions next to cloud and labor in the same dashboard to avoid surprises.
Keep reporting simple and safety obvious
- One-page summary per use case: owner, weekly value, cumulative value, risk notes, next decision date.
- Red button culture: Anyone can pause a tool if it misfires and could harm a colleague or disrupt a workflow.
Week 10: return time to teams
Expect mixed outcomes. Some processes run faster. Others show fewer errors. Approvals move sooner because drafts arrive cleaner. The pattern is consistent: people aren't replaced; time is returned to higher-value work like coaching, site visits and judgment calls.
Weeks 11-13: harden and close the loop
Validate vendor service levels. Lock down secrets. Write runbooks operations can trust. Convert time saved to dollars only when hours are reallocated to measurable outcomes. Shut down trials that did not deliver. On day 90, present realized value and a ready pipeline for the next quarter. The question becomes where next.
The framework at a glance
- Portfolio cadence: 3-5 use cases per quarter, weekly 20-minute check-ins, stop what stalls.
- Risk controls: Classify data, audit outputs, human in the loop for critical decisions.
- Funding guardrails: Foundation → trial → scale. Four-week caps on trials. No scale without an owner and rollback plan.
- Executive-ready reporting: One-page summaries, dashboards with weekly and cumulative value, quarterly updates tied to business outcomes.
What sticks
- Cadence beats cleverness. Weekly progress outperforms perfect plans.
- Plain guardrails build trust. The same rules across finance, ops, HR and sales speed approvals.
- Money follows proof. Once value maps to margin or error reduction, funding stops being a debate.
What to change next time
Bring HR and communications in earlier. Generative tools change how work happens before org charts change. Managers need coaching playbooks. Employees adopt faster when their input shows up in the tools.
Your 90-day checklist
- Pick 3-5 painful use cases with clear owners and baselines.
- Stand up guardrails. Choose hosted tools first.
- Run weekly cadences. Report one number. Stop what stalls.
- Fund by stage. No scale without value and rollback.
- Return time to teams and reallocate it to measurable outcomes.
Do not chase the perfect vendor. Start with the pain your people feel. Agree on rules. Show progress weekly. Build on platforms already in place once value is proven. The goal is compounding time across the organization. Once that starts, the model sells itself.
If you want structured upskilling for operations teams, see role-based AI course paths.
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