Turn a Business Process Into an Internal App
Every growing company has a process that lives in email, a spreadsheet, and someone's head. That process is an internal app waiting to be built — and it's usually the highest-leverage thing AI can help you ship.
the pattern
What this usually looks like today
- A customer sends a request by email
- Someone copies the details into a spreadsheet
- Someone else is pinged to review or approve it
- Status lives in a thread nobody outside it can see
- Nothing is reportable, and one person is the single point of failure
step 1
Interview the person who actually does the work
Not the manager. The operator. Ask these before you write a single prompt.
- What starts the process?
- Who receives the request?
- What information is required before work can begin?
- What gets checked, and by whom?
- Where does it stall most often?
- What has to be re-entered more than once?
- What information is sensitive?
Turn my notes about this process into a structured workflow map. Produce: 1. Trigger — what starts it 2. Actors — who touches it and in what order 3. Inputs required at each step 4. Outputs produced at each step 5. Decision points 6. Business rules (including exceptions people apply informally) 7. Handoffs and where they stall 8. Sensitive data involved 9. Steps that are pure copy-paste and could be automated 10. Steps that genuinely require human judgment Ask me questions wherever my notes are ambiguous instead of guessing. My notes: [PASTE]
Using that workflow map, spec a small internal app. Define: - The single workflow it replaces in v1 - Roles and what each role can see and do - The records to store and their fields - Status values and the allowed transitions between them - Where AI adds real value (extraction, summarizing, drafting) and where a human must approve before anything moves forward - Notifications: who gets told what, and when - The 3 numbers leadership will want reported Explicitly list what is out of scope for v1.
Automate the copying
Extraction, data entry, status updates, and routine notifications are safe to hand to the machine.
Keep the judgment
Approvals, exceptions, and anything with financial or customer risk keeps a named human in the loop.
Access rules are not optional
Internal apps hold customer and employee data. Enforce permissions in the database with row-level security — not just by hiding buttons in the UI.
rollout
Ship it without breaking the business
- Run the app in parallel with the old process for one week
- Migrate only the records that are currently active
- Train the one operator who owns the process first
- Agree on the status values before launch, not after
- Track cycle time from day one so you can prove the improvement
- Write down who fixes it when it breaks
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