Brief sections
The leak
Count the interruptions in one day: the PO that doesn’t match the quote, the customer who wants the thing you did once three years ago, the new hire asking which vendor to use, the truck that broke. Each one takes ninety seconds of your judgment — and the context switch around it costs twenty minutes of whatever you were actually doing. The business isn’t under-managed; it’s over-routed. Everything flows to you because you’re the only node that always knows the answer, and every year that stays true, it gets more true. Vacations become load-shedding exercises, and a buyer looking at the business sees one irreplaceable person and discounts accordingly.
What AI realistically does here
Three moves, in order of trust. First, the routing that’s actually rules — invoices under a threshold, standard reorder approvals, which crew covers which zip codes — gets encoded and executed, because a rule you apply the same way every time isn’t judgment; it’s policy you never wrote down. Second, for the real judgment calls, the system assembles the context and drafts the decision — here’s the history, here’s what you did the last four times, here’s a proposed answer — so ninety seconds of judgment stops costing twenty minutes of reconstruction. Third, the exception queue itself gets measured, because what shrinks it long-term isn’t AI — it’s the SOPs and deputies the pattern data tells you to create. What this can’t do is make the calls only an owner can make: pricing exceptions with relationship stakes, anything with legal exposure. Those still stop at you — just with the file already open.
What has to be true first
- Willingness to let rules be rules. If every routed decision gets re-decided by you anyway, you’ve added a step, not removed one.
- Somewhere for routed work to go — a deputy, a queue owner, a person per category. Routing to nobody is a boomerang.
- The traffic is visible. Exceptions that arrive by hallway ambush can’t be routed by anything; part of the redesign is narrowing the front door.
What we'd install
This leak is really a bundle, and the audit’s job is to unbundle it: a week-one interrupt log becomes a ranked list of interrupt categories — this category is a rule, that one needs an SOP, this one genuinely needs you. The rules and escalation paths go into the SOP library, the routing and drafting agents join the roster with named owners, and the value ledger tracks the number that matters to you personally: interruptions per day that truly require the owner, trending down. The whole arc is the AI operating partnership.
Worth it?
Log your interruptions for three days — category and minutes, nothing fancier — and price your loaded hour honestly, including what the interrupted work was worth. The calculator below turns it into an illustrative annual figure, labeled as such. The scorecard places this leak against your others; it’s the most common one we see and only sometimes the right one to fix first, because it depends on the SOPs and data the other fixes create.