We have a senior estimator who has thirty years of pricing knowledge locked in his head, and we want to use AI to duplicate his expertise before he retires. How do we extract this tribal knowledge so a machine can actually use it?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You cannot simply ask an AI to copy a human mind. If you feed an AI a giant pile of raw, unstructured interviews with your senior estimator, you will get a chaotic tool that hallucinates incorrect estimates. You must structure his tribal knowledge first.

To do this, have your estimator document his exact decision tree. Walk through his last ten estimates together. Ask him what specific variables he looked at first, how he adjusted pricing for market conditions, and what red flags made him walk away from a deal. Write these rules down as a clear, step-by-step logic model.

Once you have this logic documented, use it to build an expert system. You can program this logic into a simple AI agent. The agent will ask the user the exact same sequence of questions your estimator would ask, processing the inputs according to his proven rules.

This process turns your expert-dependent estimating department into a system-dependent operation. When you eventually prepare for an exit, a buyer will see a highly predictable, repeatable system that runs flawlessly without your senior estimator. That is how you build real enterprise value.