Before you buy an AI tool, write down the job
A subscription can't fix a job nobody has described. Five questions to answer on paper first, and the two numbers that tell you later whether it worked.
It's easy to buy an AI tool. It's much harder to say, three months later, whether it helped. Most of the time that isn't the tool's fault. It was bought before anyone wrote down what it was meant to do.
Here's the page to fill in first. It takes about twenty minutes, and it's the cheapest protection there is against paying for something nobody uses.
Five questions, on paper
- What is the job? One sentence, in words your team would use. “Reply to quote requests from the website” is a job. “Use AI for customer service” is not.
- What comes in? An email, a form, a phone message, a spreadsheet. Where does it arrive, and in what shape?
- What has to happen? The steps someone takes today, in order, including the ones that only exist in their head.
- What goes out? A reply, a quote, an updated record, a summary. Who receives it?
- Who checks it? Name the person. If the answer is nobody, that's the first thing to fix, with or without AI.
Two numbers before you start
Measure the job as it is now, over a normal couple of weeks:
- How often it happens. Count them.
- How long each one takes, from start to finish, including the waiting.
Add a third if it matters to you: how long a customer waits for an answer. These are your before numbers. Keep them somewhere you'll find them again.
Then hold the tool up to the page
With the job written down, most sales pitches become easy to test. Does the tool accept what comes in, in the shape it arrives? Can a person check what goes out before a customer sees it? Does your information stay in an account the business owns? If a demo can't answer those three, it's showing you a different job.
After a few weeks, measure the same numbers again. If the job takes less time and nothing got worse for customers, keep it. If you can't tell, the honest answer is usually that it didn't help much, and that's fine to admit.
Why we work this way
This is how we measure AI work for clients: in their own numbers, before and after, never turned into points out of 100. If you'd like help writing the page, or deciding whether a job is worth doing at all, the free 20-minute AI Fit Call is a good place to begin.