Skip the science projects. Start with the three processes costing you the most hours and prove value on one of them first.
The businesses getting real value from AI are not the ones with the biggest models. They are the ones that picked a boring, high-volume process and automated it end to end.
Supplier invoices are our favourite starting point: high volume, structured enough for extraction, and painful enough that finance teams welcome the change. One construction group was keying 4,000 invoices a month by hand.
We built extraction plus approval routing, kept a human in the loop for exceptions, and measured touchless processing weekly. Within four months, 91% of invoices never needed a person.
Governance matters as much as the model. Data handling, audit trails and staff training were part of the delivery, not an afterthought.