Some AI opportunities are relatively straightforward to explore. Your IT team might introduce a capability in software you already use, help colleagues get comfortable with it and assess the results.
Other ideas take you into bigger questions about how the business operates.
What if the improvement you want involves several systems that don’t work well together? What if an ageing application is holding back a service you want to develop? Or the process you want to change stretches across departments, with each team responsible for a different part?
That’s where bringing in an external partner can be useful. You may want specialist skills, additional delivery capacity or another perspective on the options before committing your own team’s time.
When you involve Positiv in that conversation, we start by understanding what you want to achieve. Then we work through the processes, systems and practical decisions that sit behind it.
The following examples give a flavour of the conversations worth having. Your starting point may be quite different.
“Could we take on more orders without creating more work at every stage?”
Imagine a business receiving orders and enquiries through a mixture of emails, documents and customer portals.
Someone interprets the request, checks the details against the customer record, looks up products and pricing, and enters information into the order system. Questions go back to the customer. Exceptions go to another team. Progress is tracked in a spreadsheet because no single system shows the whole picture.
As volumes grow, so does the coordination involved.
There could be an opportunity to connect that process: using AI to interpret incoming requests, integrations to retrieve and pass information between systems, and a shared application to help people review exceptions and see what needs attention.
Before proposing an approach, we would work through the order journey with the people responsible for it. Which details can be checked against reliable records? Where are the business rules clear? Which decisions need someone’s judgement? What happens when information is missing or contradictory?
AI might handle part of the work, while ordinary automation and system integration handle other parts. The design needs to bring those elements together reliably.
The business case could include shorter order turnaround, fewer corrections and greater capacity. Understanding which outcome matters most helps determine what to build and where to start.
“Our old system is limiting us. Could we do this differently now?”
Perhaps an application still performs its original job, but the business has moved on.
Teams export information into spreadsheets to work around its limitations. Customers expect access it cannot provide. Changes take too long, and knowledge of how it all fits together sits with a handful of people.
Replacing it raises an interesting question: how much of the old way of working should you recreate?
An AI-enabled business application might offer a different experience. In a service operation, for example, staff could bring together information from correspondence, job histories and technical documents, with assistance preparing a case summary or identifying missing details. Workflows could route the next action to the right person, with the underlying records kept in the appropriate systems.
There are several possible routes. An existing platform may meet the requirements. Extending or connecting current applications might be sufficient. A bespoke application could be justified where the business has needs that standard products don’t serve well.
This is where we would challenge the brief as well as assess the technology. If a replacement proposal carries forward years of workarounds, it’s worth asking which ones are still needed. Equally, an ambition to replace everything at once may deserve a more manageable, phased approach.
The cost of migration, integration, support and future changes belongs in that discussion from the beginning. So does what your own IT team wants to retain responsibility for.
“Could we turn the information we hold into a new customer service?”
A business may have years of useful information spread across service records, reports, correspondence and specialist knowledge.
Bringing it together could create an opportunity to offer customers something new: a clearer view of their activity, more tailored reporting or easier access to information that currently requires someone to collate it manually.
For example, a service business might explore a customer portal that combines account and operational data with AI-assisted explanations of completed work and outstanding actions. Customers could ask questions about their own records, with answers grounded in approved information and a clear route to a person when needed.
Delivering that involves much more than adding a chat window. It raises questions about data ownership, access permissions, integration, answer quality and how the service will be supported.
We would also want to explore the commercial proposition with you. What would customers find useful? Would it strengthen an existing service or support a new paid offering? What could you test with a small group before investing in the full idea?
That discussion may take an unexpected turn. A project that begins as an internal reporting improvement could reveal a useful customer service - or customer feedback might point towards something quite different from the original proposal.
A useful partner should help you make better choices
Your IT team may already have a strong view of what is possible. You may need help validating that view, bringing different stakeholders together or delivering work alongside existing priorities.
Our role is to contribute where it helps: examining the requirements, assessing the options and making the trade-offs clear.
We’ll question an expected return if it depends on assumptions that haven’t been tested. We’ll say if a proposed build looks unnecessarily complicated. And we’ll explore a more ambitious option if there’s a credible reason it could deliver greater value.
That should be an open conversation. You know the business, and your people understand the realities of the work. Combining that knowledge with a fresh technical and business perspective gives us a stronger starting point.
Start with the outcome you have in mind
Our AI Discovery Workshop provides a focused way to begin.
Through preparation, a four-hour session with a Business AI specialist and a follow-up plan, we examine your priorities and identify opportunities for further investigation. You receive a shortlist of 3 - 4 AI opportunities, estimated benefits, indicative costs and considerations, and practical next steps.
For a complex application or integration project, that gives you an initial basis for deciding what deserves more detailed discovery and validation.
You don’t need to have chosen a tool or written a specification. Bring the ambition, the process you want to rethink or the possibility you’d like to explore.
