A 90-day plan is a planning framework, not a promise that every workflow can become autonomous in three months. The right first outcome is a bounded process that your team can evaluate, supervise, and recover. Expand autonomy only when the evidence supports it.
Days 1–15: map one workflow and its exceptions
Choose a repeatable task with an identifiable owner. Document intake is one example: receive a file, extract fields, validate them, and prepare a draft record. Avoid starting with an entire department or a high-impact decision that has no reliable review path.
Walk through normal cases and difficult ones with the people doing the job. Record the source systems, required permissions, missing fields, duplicate submissions, and reasons a task is rejected. Measure the time spent on checking and correction as well as initial processing.
Days 16–40: build an assisted version
Keep the first version in a test environment or a draft-only workflow. Let the system suggest an output while a person remains responsible for accepting it. Separate extraction errors from business-rule failures so the team knows what needs improvement.
For an illustrative document workflow, the output might contain extracted fields, links to the relevant source pages, and a list of checks that did not pass. It should not quietly turn uncertain information into a final approved record.
Days 41–65: evaluate the complete handoff
Compare assisted work with the existing process on representative cases. Track successful completion, review effort, unresolved exceptions, and operating cost. Test duplicate requests, unavailable integrations, expired permissions, and a user cancelling midway through a task.
- Can a reviewer see what changed and why?
- Can retries create duplicate records or repeated external actions?
- Is there an identifiable owner for each unresolved task?
- Can the team stop the automation without losing the work queue?
Days 66–90: release a narrow, observable workflow
If the acceptance criteria are met, start with a bounded user group and a clear support route. Keep irreversible or high-impact actions behind an approval gate. Define alerts around the failures someone can actually respond to, and make the manual process available during recovery.
If evaluation exposes a blocker, use this phase to resolve it instead of forcing a launch date. A missing integration or unreliable source may matter more than another model adjustment.
What to bring to a discovery session
Share the workflow map, representative inputs with sensitive information handled appropriately, current system boundaries, and the decisions that must remain human-owned. Our AI agents and automation service connects those requirements to tool integration, evaluation, and release planning. For an example of source-grounded assistance, explore our knowledge search and generative AI work.
