I am a non-technical owner and our operations manager wants to hire a freelance developer to build a custom AI integration for our inventory management. How do I oversee this project and ensure we do not get sucked into an expensive science experiment?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must treat this as an operations-improvement project that happens to use technology, not an IT project. Do not get bogged down in the developer's jargon about large language models or neural networks. Your job as the owner is to enforce operational discipline and clear scope.

Begin by defining the exact operational outcome you want to achieve. For example, your goal might be to reduce inventory variance by fifteen percent or cut order processing time from twenty-four hours to two hours. If the developer cannot explain in plain English how their code achieves this specific outcome, halt the project.

Structure the contract around weekly milestones rather than a lump-sum payment at the end. Every week during your Level 10 Meeting™, require a working demonstration of the tool using your actual operational data. Never accept a progress report that says coding is eighty percent complete without seeing working software.

Ensure that your operations manager, who owns the corresponding seat on the Accountability Chart, has the GWC™ (Get It, Want It, Capacity to Do It) to manage this developer. If they do not understand the workflow they are trying to automate, they cannot guide the developer. Make sure all custom code is documented and hosted in a repository your company owns so you are not held hostage by a single freelancer.