Mapping how the work really gets done

The situation

The company had grown across more than a dozen departments, and its processes lived mostly in people’s heads. Documents, where they existed, described how work was meant to go. Leadership wanted an evidence-based picture, from the people doing the work, before choosing what to automate.

What was done

• Interviews in people’s own languages. Staff were interviewed by Sara, our AI interviewer, by voice or by text, in whichever language they were comfortable in. Four languages were used.
• SOP extraction. Each interview produced a role profile, a standard operating procedure and a process map, which the employee could review and correct.
• Reconciliation. Accounts of the same process from different people were merged into one sequence, with agreements and disagreements kept visible rather than averaged away.

What was found

• About 70 people invited, and more than 90% completed an interview. Interviews ran by voice or by text.
• Over 100 distinct processes documented, each with a reconciled step sequence, across more than a dozen departments.
• About 80% were flagged as candidates for change: roughly a third for straightforward automation, a third for AI assistance and a fifth for agent-style automation. The rest were judged better left manual.
• About a quarter of processes had points of disagreement, where people described the same work differently.
• About 30 areas of knowledge risk, around two thirds of them held by a single person.
• Roughly 800 hours a week of stated effort across about half of the processes. The rest had no usable time figure.
• Average readiness of around 55 out of 100 for documenting and automating the processes, on Prism’s own scale.

What these figures are. They come from interviews: what employees said, not what was observed or measured on the floor. Hours are stated estimates that may overlap between processes, so the total is an indication, not a payroll figure. The classifications and readiness scores are model-assisted judgements, to be reviewed by the company before anyone acts on them.

What changed, and what happens next

Today this is a findings-only engagement. We have no verified outcome, such as hours saved or a process shortened, to report, and we will not estimate one here. What the company has is a documented, reconciled baseline, a list of disputed processes to settle, and a shortlist of candidates to evaluate. Any later result will be published only once it can be measured.

How it worked

1. Staff received an invitation link to their own interview, with a consent screen.
2. Sara interviewed each person about their role, tools and day-to-day work, by voice or text.
3. Each employee could review and correct what was written about their work.
4. Prism reconciled all accounts into one company-wide picture and showed its gaps rather than hiding them.

For how interview data is handled, see Trust & security. To talk about your own discovery, contact us.