Stop counting prompts.
The best AI brief starts with a dollar sign.
Swipe ↑The CEO’s AI job is not prompting.
Write the value ledger before the workflow. Otherwise AI can look busy forever.
A distributor put AI on the P&L.
The company had doubled revenue in a decade. The brief was not “use more AI.” It was: scale without adding complexity.
The clever bit was accounting.
They examined where growth and operating leverage actually lived.
Legacy workflows were redesigned; high-value opportunities were ranked.
Leaders owned the transformation with the delivery team—not via an “AI lab” next door.
Value realization continued after implementation. Go-live was not the finish line.
Give it a scoreboard, not a vibe.
Repeatable flow. Stable source data. Predictable rules. A measurable finish line.
Novel trade-offs, trust, ethics, marginal calls—or a process nobody agrees on.
Name the error that matters: margin leakage, lead decay, file rework, stockout, churn.
AI can optimise against a definition of “better.” It cannot responsibly invent your definition for you.
Make AI earn the next 30 days.
You are helping redesign [WORKFLOW].
Baseline: [TIME / COST / ERROR / CONVERSION]
Target by [DATE]: [NUMBER]
Source of truth: [SYSTEM / REPORT]
Human owner: [NAME]
Constraints: [RISK / APPROVAL / QUALITY]
Recommend the smallest safe workflow change and a weekly test. Separate AI work from process redesign. If the target misses by day 30, recommend STOP or REDESIGN—and say why.That is not a magic prompt. It is a tiny operating contract.
Useful proof. Not a benchmark.
The client is unnamed. We cannot inspect the baseline, geography, P&L or counterfactual.
No timeframe or program cost. $6M recurring savings is not $6M net ROI.
“AI and automation” are bundled. Process redesign, nearshore delivery and leadership discipline also moved the number.
The author sold the work. Treat the result as evidence of the method—not a promise about yours.
Microsoft buried the rollout.
Licensed to 200,000 people.
Usage plateaued. Impact did not materialise.
Then the sales team mapped moments that mattered. Priority-use adoption tripled; revenue per account manager rose 9.4%; close rates rose 20%.