Christophe Berly
FR/EN
Get in touchContact

03 · Ordre de marche

Where to start with AI? Three weeks to decide, with your numbers in hand.

The people I meet, owners of small and mid-sized companies, subsidiary heads, business unit leaders in larger groups, are in one of two situations. Either a long list of things to automate, with no criterion to sort it. Or nothing specific: the feeling they should be moving on AI, and no idea where to start. In both cases the answer is the same: look at how your business makes and loses money, where it rests on a single person, and what your strategy needs first. That's what I do with you over three weeks. You leave with three workstreams, each carried by someone on your team.

You arrive with

A question: where to start with AI? Sometimes a list of tasks to automate, sometimes nothing specific yet.

I look with you at

Your strategy, ten numbers, the people who carry the business, what annoys your teams, and the map of your processes.

You leave with

Three workstreams in order, an owner on your team for each, and a first visible win within the month.

The thread with my method: the model before the tool. AI priorities are read in your strategy and your profitability, not in a catalogue of tools. One practical note: the engagement runs in French, and so do the documents shown below.

Get in touch See how it works

How it works

Three 45-minute meetings. Most of the work happens in between, and I'm the one doing it.

  1. Day 0

    Framing

    Thirty minutes on the phone. We check it's worth it, we set the three dates. Within the hour, you receive a one-page note on how we'll work.

    The opening note, example with fictitious data, in French
    The opening note
  2. Week 1

    Meeting 1 · Understand

    45 minutes, you, alone or with a partner. You talk, I ask six questions, always the same ones, and I listen. Nothing to prepare.

  3. Same evening

    What I understood

    I send you one page, and a file already filled in with what you told me. You correct it, one hour. Your team members complete their part, fifteen minutes each.

    The pre-filled collection file, Numbers tab, example with fictitious data, in French
    The pre-filled file
  4. Week 2

    Meeting 2 · Verify

    45 minutes with two or three of your people, you in the room. Ten numbers read aloud, then the map of your processes reviewed and corrected together.

  5. Week 3

    Meeting 3 · Decide

    45 minutes, same people. I present three workstreams, in order. Each of your people takes theirs, and you set the date of the first win.

    The one-page summary presented at the final meeting, example with fictitious data, in French
    The summary, then the plan
  6. Five weeks later

    A phone call

    Fifteen minutes, you and me, to know whether the first win landed and what got in the way. After that, I'm out of the loop.

What you receive

Short documents, written to be corrected.

The opening note: the three meetings, what I ask, what I don't do. Example, fictitious data, in French.

The opening note

Sent within the hour after framing: the three dates, what I ask of you between meetings, what I don't do, what I see and what stays with you.

Example, fictitious data, in French
The collection file, Numbers tab: ten lines, pre-filled values on a coloured background, a status per line. Example, fictitious data, in French.

The pre-filled file

Six tabs: ten numbers, your people, what annoys, three questions, the map of your processes. What sits on a coloured background comes from our conversation. You strike out, you correct, line by line.

Example, fictitious data, in French
The one-page summary: the question asked and the one addressed, three findings, three workstreams, what is left aside, the decisions of the day. Example, fictitious data, in French.

The summary, then the plan

One page I present aloud at the third meeting. The full plan comes the same day: for each workstream, why this one, who carries it on your team, done when, and what I leave aside.

Example, fictitious data, in French

The time it takes you

What I mostly ask is that you hold the three dates.

You4 hthe framing call, three meetings, one hour to correct the file
Each team member involved1 h 45fifteen minutes on the file, the workshop, the final meeting

On my side, most of it happens between meetings: reading what you send, extracting, filling the file, drawing the maps, sorting, writing the plan. That's where the quality of what you receive is decided, and that's why I do it myself.

How I sort

By euros moved, not hours saved.

A ninety-minute task done once a quarter never gets automated. A ten-minute task done two hundred times a month does. And in a team of ten or twenty people, hours saved are the smallest deposit there is: a contract that leaves, or one you don't sign, weighs far more. So I rank in this order.

1
Protect existing revenue

It's already earned. Keeping it always costs less than replacing it.

2
Win new revenue

One more contract often pays for the whole programme.

3
Reduce the cost of service

Every euro saved per unit multiplies by volume. Delicate, because it touches the craft itself.

4
Save hours internally

Useful, but rarely the right criterion. Yet it's the one behind almost every list.

The bar shows the order of magnitude of what it moves in euros, for a services business of ten to fifty people.

"Automate" means three different things

Remove the task

The most expensive

The machine does everything, nobody checks. The most expensive to build, and the only regime that can put a visible mistake in front of a customer.

A draft a human validates

Almost always the right answer

The machine prepares, someone rereads for thirty seconds and sends. Ten times cheaper, reversible.

Trigger at the right moment

The most overlooked

An alert, a reminder, a follow-up. The cheapest of the three. No AI needed.

Most workstreams end up in the last two: simple pipes between your tools, and a written rule. AI is only useful where there is no clear rule, to sort a request, summarise, draft.

What I look for

Twelve things you stop seeing when you're inside.

They come back from one business to the next, in four families. I look for all of them, in your numbers, in the map, and in what your teams say at the workshop. I keep none without a line of the file or a sentence from a meeting to back it.

Money

The wrong metric
Ranking by hours saved when the money is lost elsewhere.
Not enough volume
The most visible task on the list, too rare to be worth it.
Concentration
A customer so large that losing them wipes out the margin.

People

Dormant capacity
Someone on the team no step of the map mentions.
The human constraint
A plan that doesn't fit the workload of the people meant to carry it.
Risk without an owner
Something running with no one responsible, and no one to fix it when it breaks.

The map

The duplicate
The same work done twice, by two teams, with the same tools.
The master link
The bottleneck all the others depend on.
The hole in the map
A function the map doesn't show, because you carry it yourself.
The condemned process
A process you want to automate when it's already decided to drop it.

Assets and rules

The dormant asset
Something already built and paid for, no longer used.
The missing criterion
A decision impossible to automate because the rule was never written down.
At one client, the list ran to fifty-eight tasks, ranked by hours saved. The money was lost elsewhere: two points of contract renewal weighed more than all those hours combined.The wrong metric
Elsewhere, a quarterly review was prepared twice, by two teams, with the same tools. Each saw its own side. Nobody saw the whole.The duplicate

My role, and yours

What I do, and what I don't

I build nothing and I don't run your workstreams. I stop at the launch of the first one, plus a phone call five weeks later. The owners I name are on your team, and so are the deadlines. I record our meetings for my own use, I say so every time, and nothing your team says leaves your file, neither towards your management or shareholders, nor towards my network.

What I ask of you

Three things, which I check on the first call. Hold three meetings in three weeks. Accept that I may address a different question from the one you ask, if your numbers lead me there. And have someone on your team to build what we decide. If one of the three is missing, I say so, and we don't go ahead.

Questions I get asked

"I don't have time for an audit."
Three times 45 minutes, and one hour to correct a file. The rest, I do.
"You'll sell me a development project afterwards."
No. I build nothing and I run nothing. Most workstreams are simple connections between your tools, put in place by your teams.
"What if the plan doesn't suit me?"
I present it aloud before sending it, precisely for that. If the three workstreams don't suit you, we re-sort in the meeting, among what I had set aside.
"Why record our meetings?"
So you never have to repeat yourself, and so what I send back is what you said, not what I remembered. If it bothers you, I take notes.
"And what I share with you, where does it go?"
On my professional tools, accessible to me alone. Nothing is attributed to an employee in my documents, nothing leaves your file. Three months after the final meeting, I delete the recordings, transcripts and working file. You keep the plan. The details.

We start with thirty minutes on the phone. Nothing to prepare: bring what annoys you.

Get in touch The other ways to engage

This page also exists as a PDF (in French), to pass around internally.