Field notes from inside the engine room

Most AI consulting starts in the wrong room. It starts with the technology — a demo, a platform, a list of tools looking for somewhere to be useful. The conversation jumps straight to what could we automate before anyone has earned the right to answer it.

I learned a long time ago, managing $400M+ in indirect spend and the people behind it, that you can't fix what you can't see. And the work that actually drains a mid-market business — the Operational Leakage — is almost never written down. It lives in the heads of your most experienced people. It's the judgment call a procurement lead makes in three seconds and couldn't fully explain if you asked. It's the workaround a specialist invented years ago that the whole team now quietly depends on. That knowledge is the asset. It's also invisible. And you can't hand invisible work to an AI.

So before we recommend a single enablement, we do the unglamorous thing first: we listen.

The problem with listening at scale

Here's the catch. Listening properly is expensive. To document how a team really works, you sit with people across multiple conversations, you let them walk you through the messy reality, and you ask the same question five different ways until the actual decision logic surfaces. Then someone has to turn hours of rambling, valuable, human conversation into something structured enough to act on.

For years I did that by hand — notebooks, templates, transcripts I re-read at midnight. It worked, but it didn't scale, and the best insights were often the ones that slipped through the cracks between sessions.

So we built a tool to carry that weight. Not to replace the listening — to make it possible to listen more, and lose less of it.

What the tool actually does

It is, deliberately, not clever for the sake of it. It does four things, in order — the same way I would.

1. It captures the conversations. Across multiple working sessions with a client's team, it takes in every transcript — the full, unedited reality of how the work gets done.
2. It flags what it can't see clearly. Where a step is vague or a decision goes unexplained, it surfaces the gap instead of papering over it — so we go back and get the real answer instead of guessing.
3. It documents the workflows. It turns those conversations into clean, structured records — the trigger, every step, the system touched, the decision rule, the handoff, the pain point. The institutional wisdom, finally written down.
4. It assesses the opportunity. It scores each step for AI potential and produces a prioritized list of enablements — ranked by value recovered, effort, and risk, with the high-stakes steps flagged to keep a human firmly in the loop.

This is Phase 1 of Performance AI — Diagnose — and it now runs as an instrument instead of an ordeal.

The client experience

The client was a medical billing company whose senior people were doing exactly what senior people everywhere are doing: spending a third of their week on manual friction that had nothing to do with why they were hired.

Over three conversations, the tool captured how the work actually moved — not the org-chart version, the real one. What came back wasn't a tidy story. It was the truth: multiple distinct workflows, each carrying its own quiet leakage, mapped end to end.

Two things happened that I want to be precise about.

First, the team felt heard. There's a moment in every Diagnose when a long-tenured expert realizes the goal isn't to replace them — it's to write down what they know so the organization stops being one resignation away from losing it. That moment changes the room. People stop defending their work and start improving it.

Second, we ended with a decision, not a wish list. Instead of a vague sense that "we should do something with AI," the client had a ranked roadmap: here is where the leakage is, here is the Efficiency Dividend waiting in each one, here is what to do first — and here is what we will deliberately not automate, because a human judgment belongs there.

The principle underneath the tool

I'm wary of tools that promise to think for you. This one doesn't. It thinks with you, and it earns its keep by doing the part that doesn't scale — capturing human work faithfully — so the expensive human judgment can go where it actually matters.

That's the whole philosophy, and it's the one I'll keep building on: AI should serve people, not replace them. Diagnose before you deploy. Capture the wisdom before you automate the task. The companies that get the order right are the ones for whom AI investment finally pays back.

The ones who start in the technology room are still waiting.

Paula Taylor is CEO & Founder of AI Edge Strategy. She spent 25+ years in enterprise operations, including as Global Director of Indirect Procurement at NXP Semiconductors, where she managed $400M+ in indirect spend and a 10,000-contractor contingent workforce program.