Discovery

Find work that AI could materially improve or make possible, and establish what it would need to accomplish. Study business practice and model capability together: the current process reveals the problem; experiments reveal which parts of that process still need to exist.

Follow meaningful work

Start with an outcome people care about and reconstruct how it is produced. Follow an assignment through its sources, judgments, tools, handoffs and finished output. Inspect the working files and systems alongside interviews. Separate effort from waiting and identify where the work is repeated because context or a decision did not travel with it.

Choose contrasting cases that expose the design: an ordinary success, a difficult assignment and work the organization wanted but could not justify doing. For an analyst, this might include the published forecast, a disputed driver and a scenario abandoned for lack of time. The opportunity may lie in broader coverage, deeper investigation or a new service as much as faster completion.

Find employees already doing unusually useful work with AI. Watch a complete session, including how they delegate, recover from poor results and assess the output. Identify what makes their practice transferable: access to context, a reusable instruction, a tool, domain judgment or permission to work differently. Usage totals alone will not reveal those ingredients.

Expose the judgment and context

Reconstruct the moment an expert changed their mind. Ask what they noticed, which explanation they discarded, what evidence they sought next and which action followed. Change one fact and ask whether the decision changes. This exposes the reasoning an AI system must perform more clearly than a list of business rules.

Inspect what the relevant records mean. A revenue forecast can describe a planning assumption while a contract describes a binding term. A release date may refer to code completion, limited availability or customer rollout. Establish how a person resolves those differences and where current information lives. These semantics determine useful retrieval, tools and working state.

Separate knowledge that can be supplied from authority the organization must exercise. An analyst may be able to develop a pricing scenario using finance's assumptions without acquiring authority to approve the price. AI can expand the work a role performs while leaving specific decisions with their existing owners.

Explore what AI can do with the work

Give a capable current model a meaningful assignment, representative context and the tools needed to pursue it. Let it search, calculate, inspect files, run code or revise an artifact where those actions serve the task. Compare the finished work and the path taken with the expert's approach.

Investigate failures at the right level. Missing access, conflicting versions and an underspecified outcome call for different changes from weak reasoning. If the team spends every session rebuilding the same context, investigate a shared workspace or maintained context. If the task depends on discovering the next question, try a goal-directed agent rather than encoding the interviewer's imagined sequence.

Use the experiment to redesign work with the team. What can people now do themselves? Which handoffs disappear? What should become continuous? Where does review effort move? Test these choices inside a working day, including the specialist who receives the result. A useful workshop has participants work through the changed assignment and improve it.

Turn discovery into a direction

Recommend the changed work and the next deployment or experiment. Explain the finding that changed your view, the capability demonstrated, and the remaining question that could change the choice. Produce the requested workflow, prototype, discovery synthesis or technical investigation. Use existing working material and complete authorized updates as part of the assignment.

Read the release-planning investigation for an example where a convincing AI answer exposes a missing distinction and leads to a stronger delegation.