Shadow the real work
The documented process and the one people actually run are never the same thing. I follow the real one, including the exceptions nobody wrote down, and map where the time and the errors actually go.
I embed with your team, audit one real workflow, build an agent for it, and prove it against your own historical data before anything touches production. It runs on the systems you already have. No migration. No slideware.
Most pilots die because somebody built the demo first and went looking for evidence later. This runs in the other order. Each phase has to prove itself before I'll sell you the next one.
The documented process and the one people actually run are never the same thing. I follow the real one, including the exceptions nobody wrote down, and map where the time and the errors actually go.
A golden dataset built from your own history, with the right answers hand-labeled. The agent gets graded against it: pass rate, and every failure mode worth naming. You see the number before you have to trust anything.
It goes live in a sandbox first, wired into the tools your team already opens every day. Autonomy expands when the numbers say it can. Nothing else moves it.
The first builds go into youth sports operations through Sketchplay, the league and club management company I own: registration, scheduling, and support, the work clubs, leagues, and tournament operators run every season. Real data, real deadlines, and nobody to blame but me.
Youth sports operations are dense, judgment-heavy, and run by small teams with no engineers of their own. A season has real money and real parents in it. Get an agent working under those conditions and the method carries into any business built on the same kind of operational complexity.
The vertical is where I'm starting. It isn't the business.
Each tier is one phase of the method above, bought on its own. You can stop after any one of them. Some engagements should.