Picture your company a year from now. Finance closes the month with every reconciliation prepared before the finance manager sits down. Client service sends every client a Friday update the same afternoon. Operations compares three supplier quotes in the time it used to take to open them. That is a company doing the impossible with the team it has, and getting 10X the ROI of its existing AI spend.
No team gets there by planning every role on day one. A plan by role is the destination: what each role should be able to do with AI. A 70-person company may have thirty roles, and nobody describes thirty well in the first week. Every team lead can describe their team’s week. Start there.
A plan before agents argues for planning before you buy. This piece covers where the plan starts and its first month.
Teams first, then roles.
Lay out the company the way it already runs: departments, then the sub-departments inside them where the work differs. Client service may split into account management and the service desk, and operations into scheduling and purchasing. Stop where one lead can say what the team does every week. Every workflow lands on a branch of that tree.
Roles come next, as an early milestone rather than a condition for starting. Once a team has its workflows, the kinds of job inside it become obvious: who prepares the variance commentary, who reviews it, who approves the payment run. Teams and roles are named for the work, not for a person, and nobody is rated or ranked. For work that passes between teams, read An AI org chart should show the work between teams.
About five workflows per team, as suggestions.
Five is enough to change how a team works and few enough to practise. Describe your company in a few sentences and Fully Powered Planner drafts a starting plan, with about five suggested workflows for each team. Accept the ones that fit, change the ones that are close, and reject the ones that miss, putting your own in their place. The suggestions are material for brainstorming: the five a team practises are the five it settles on.
Ask the people who do the work which suggestions match their week. They know which tasks come round every Monday and which arrive in a different shape each time. We ask them; nothing records or monitors anyone. Build your AI plan with the people who do the work sets out the questions.
Repeatable work and ad hoc work.
Mark each workflow as one of two kinds. Repeatable work follows the same steps on similar inputs every time: the month-end close, the Friday client update, the quote comparison. It becomes a workflow your people run with AI, tested on your own cases, with a person checking and deciding. It is also where a connection to the accounting system or the CRM pays off most.
Ad hoc work changes shape every time: a one-off question from the board, or a client asking for something new. It is helped by better use of the AI the company already pays for: people who give it the right material, ask good questions and check what comes back. Repeatable work and ad hoc work has the sorting sheet.
Three teams, five workflows each.
Illustrative example with invented data. An invented 70-person facilities services company: finance (5 people), client service (12, in account management and the service desk) and operations (40, in scheduling, purchasing and the field crews). Each team after its lead reviewed the suggestions with the people who do the work.
| Finance workflow | Kind | The team’s call |
|---|---|---|
| Month-end close checklist | Repeatable | Accepted. |
| Overdue-invoice follow-up preparation | Repeatable | Changed: only invoices over 30 days late, and the account manager sees each draft first. |
| Budget-versus-actual variance commentary | Repeatable | Accepted. |
| Supplier bill review and payment run preparation | Repeatable | Accepted. The finance manager approves every run. |
| A one-off question from leadership, such as what losing a contract does to cash | Ad hoc | Added in place of the suggested 13-week cash forecast, already kept in a spreadsheet the team trusts. |
| Client service workflow | Kind | The team’s call |
|---|---|---|
| Client-status update preparation | Repeatable | Accepted. |
| Customer reply drafting | Repeatable | Changed: the service desk only, for scheduling and site-access questions. |
| Complaint and refund request handling | Repeatable | Changed: AI prepares the summary and the options; the head of client service decides every refund. |
| Account handoff | Repeatable | Accepted, and listed under operations too, which takes over every new site. |
| Preparing for a difficult client conversation | Ad hoc | Added in place of quarterly business review preparation: only three clients get one. |
| Operations workflow | Kind | The team’s call |
|---|---|---|
| Service roster options | Repeatable | Accepted. The scheduler chooses the roster. |
| Vendor quote comparison | Repeatable | Accepted. |
| SOP exception capture | Repeatable | Changed: run after every job that left the procedure, not once a month. |
| Operations KPI scorecard | Repeatable | Changed: weekly, with the six measures the operations director already reviews. |
| Writing a procedure for a service the company has never offered | Ad hoc | Added in place of the suggested inventory reorder plan: the company holds little stock. |
Every repeatable workflow here starts from a workflow template, such as overdue-invoice follow-up preparation, client-status update preparation, account handoff and SOP exception capture, each adapted to the company’s rules and tested on its own work before a team relies on it.
What the first month looks like.
Illustrative example with invented data. The same invented company, four weeks from an empty plan to the first workflow chosen to build.
The first month of the plan
- Week 1: teams
- The operations director describes the company, lays out the teams and sub-departments, and invites the three team leads. Each lead reviews their team’s suggestions.
- Week 2: the people who do the work
- Each lead spends twenty minutes with two or three people from the team, settles the five and marks each repeatable or ad hoc.
- Week 3: roles
- Each team names the kinds of job inside it. Finance names finance manager, accounts payable and billing. Every workflow gets one owning role.
- Week 4: what to build first
- The leads rank the twelve repeatable workflows on how often they run, how many people run them and what a mistake costs. Overdue-invoice follow-up comes first: weekly, done by three people, with a written procedure. Client service sets aside an hour to practise its ad hoc work with the AI the company already pays for.
- End of the month
- Fifteen workflows across three teams, twelve repeatable and three ad hoc, roles named in every team, an owner on each workflow and the first build chosen.
Every workflow prepares; a person in the owning role checks and decides. Payments stay with the finance manager and refunds with the head of client service.
Choose your first AI wins has the scorecard behind week 4. A clearly documented procedure like that follow-up fits the 3-Day Workflow Sprint ($750), built as evidence of the idea. When a whole area needs its work captured, the 2-Week Workflow Sprint ($3,500) asks the team how it does the work and builds out its workflows.
Why the plan runs for a year.
A team needs a few weeks to turn one workflow into a habit. Five workflows in each team, then the roles inside them, is a year of work done properly. A year is also short enough to stay current: the AI platforms improve every few months, and a three-year plan would describe tools that have moved on. Each year you add teams, take roles deeper and retire what a team has outgrown.
Decide where your company is going with AI. Then bring your people there, one workflow at a time. Your plan runs on whichever AI your company already uses: ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini. Your platforms, your pace, your people, and your organization keeps control of how the work gets done.
Add your first three teams and review the five workflows suggested for each.
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