One of our first questions when onboarding a new client is “what’s the dumbest way employees spend their time?” The responses are often hilarious, and two of them over the last month covered the same problem:

“We literally spend 15 days a month of a lot of people's time and energy and effort to then spit out reports that are sometimes accurate. After that, we go back and review the number to be more accurate. And, to me, it's just a very dysfunctional way of doing it.”

- CEO, PE-Owned Automotive Services Company

“We should just use natural language to query our ERP to ask how much we paid this vendor over the past two years... Right now that simple information exists in internal reports and still takes people 20 minutes to find that information. It should be immediately available.”

- COO & President, Manufacturing Start-Up

Reporting is somehow both critical and a waste of time. It’s hard to make quality decisions without gathering historical and real-time company data. And yet it’s also hard to act on any decisions for the business when reporting processes consume time and resources.  

Both quotes above make it seem as though each company’s data is stored in Asia and shipped via ocean freight to the US. The data exists, and the insights are valuable, so why does there have to be this lag between the two? I’m a one-trick pony, so you know what answer is coming.

The era of squinting to read static reports on your phone should be over. AI has the ability to solve this, but only under the right circumstances. Across our client base, we see 3 types of reporting:

1. The Snapshot: this is like your January P&L report. You need it to summarize the month but you don’t want it to change once February starts.

2. The Dashboard: this is the live scoreboard of your business. For some it’s the number of pending orders in the system. For others it’s the tracker for your sales team’s yearly quotas. 

3. The Ask: this is for the tough questions that you can’t predict you’ll need answers for in the future. Instead of sending the team running in circles, these reports get made with AI as if it knew you were going to ask and had prepared accordingly.

The point is that not every report needs to be Type #3. Most of our clients already have a strong system in place for Type #1 and #2, so it’s important to lay the foundation for Type #3 so that when those unplanned questions come up they don’t derail everyday business functions.

So here’s the game plan: 

• Meet with five different people that report to you and ask them which outputs they make for you are the most time-consuming. Said differently, “what’s the dumbest way you spend your time building reports?”

This exercise is meant to triage which reports need AI and which reports don’t. Snapshot reports could benefit from automation if they are highly tedious, but likely don’t need anything fancy. Dashboards have been around for ages so any off-the-shelf software program can help. Type #3 is where AI actually helps and often where we step in to build for clients.  

If you run this process and want a second opinion on which type you're dealing with, reply and tell me what you found.