I am a non-technical owner whose department heads keep bringing AI concepts to our Level 10 Meeting. What specific operational questions should I ask during IDS to separate practical workflows from software hype?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You do not need a computer science degree to cut through software theater in your Level 10 Meeting. As the business owner, your role is not to inspect code or understand neural networks. Your role is to enforce business fundamentals and hold your Integrator and department heads accountable to bottom-line results.

When a team member brings an AI initiative to the table during IDS, force them to strip away the technical jargon and answer four plain operational questions:
- What documented Core Process does this tool touch, and what specific step does it automate?
- Exactly what low-value task are our employees doing right now that this software will eliminate?
- Who sits in the accountable seat on the Accountability Chart when this workflow breaks or produces flawed data?
- What measurable on our weekly Scorecard will move within sixty days of turning this tool on?

If your department head answers with buzzwords about machine intelligence, workflow transformation, or cutting-edge capabilities, kill the discussion. They are selling you theater.

A real operational upgrade is simple. It sounds like: our accounting clerk spends eight hours every Tuesday retyping vendor bills into QuickBooks, and this script reads the PDF and drafts the entry for human approval in five minutes. If they cannot explain the workflow that simply, they do not understand the problem yet. Push them back to the whiteboard until they can define the operational bottleneck in plain business English.