Make Your Know-How Reusable
As AI becomes part of daily work, the experience inside your business needs a form others can use.
There is someone in your business who knows when a routine order needs special handling. Someone who spots the missing condition in a quotation. Someone who hears a customer’s request and immediately knows which question to ask next.
That experience has commercial value. It protects margins, prevents mistakes and helps customers receive a consistent service.
But when using it requires finding the same person every time, the business has a bottleneck. Introducing AI makes that dependence worth examining: which parts of your team’s expertise can others reliably use?
Capture the reasoning behind the answer
Consider a distributor preparing a quotation.
A price list provides product names and amounts. An experienced salesperson also checks whether freight could erase the margin, whether the requested delivery date is realistic and whether a substitution needs the customer’s approval.
An AI tool given only the price list could produce a polished quotation while missing those conditions.
A useful starting point is to make the decision process explicit. What information does the salesperson check? Which conditions change the offer? What requires approval? What should happen when information is missing?
The same questions apply to preparing proposals, reviewing invoices, handling returns and scheduling work.
Make a small piece of experience usable
Choose one recurring task that regularly sends colleagues back to the same experienced person.
Ask that person to walk through a recent case. Record what they checked, what influenced their decision and which exceptions mattered. Include an example of an acceptable result and explain when the task should be referred to someone else.
A short, specific guide can be enough to begin. It should identify its owner, its current sources and the date it was last reviewed. Where different customers have different terms, make those distinctions visible.
Then give the guide to a colleague and ask them to apply it to another case.
Their questions will expose the missing context: the condition everyone supposedly knows, the outdated rule, the exception that was never written down.
Give AI a clearer foundation
Once that guidance works for a colleague, it becomes a stronger starting point for AI assistance.
Within the company’s approved tools and access rules, test whether AI can use it to prepare a draft, identify missing information or flag a case requiring review. Check ordinary cases and exceptions. Clear guidance improves the basis for the work; the results still need verification.
The exercise also helps the business immediately. New employees have something concrete to learn from. Colleagues can handle more routine work independently. Experienced people can spend more attention on cases that require their judgment.
This week’s move
Find one task, one experienced person and one recent example. Turn the reasoning into a short guide. Test it with a colleague, correct what is missing and assign someone to keep it current.
The next useful AI investment may be an hour spent documenting how your best people make decisions.
