A large part of operational work happens before the visible task begins. Someone has to find the record, check what was said, reconcile two definitions, assemble a spreadsheet or prepare a message.
In building DeeJay with UBI Business School, we kept returning to that preparation. Helping people start with the relevant context and a usable first version was a practical way to make their work easier.
Three workflows illustrate the approach: correspondence lookup, repeatable reporting and follow-up preparation. Each solves a different kind of friction.
1. Make the history easier to find
An admissions colleague may need to understand a conversation before responding to an applicant. The relevant history can sit across records, messages and internal notes.
DeeJay’s correspondence tool was built to assemble that history into a bounded timeline. It distinguishes the direction of a message and identifies relevant letter events, giving the colleague a clearer starting point for checking the case.
Matching the right person is part of the task. Where a name could refer to more than one person, the system needs clarification rather than a confident guess. Reducing search time is valuable only if the information belongs to the right case.
2. Make recurring reports repeatable
A report becomes useful when people agree what its figures mean. At UBI, intake reporting required specific definitions of programme groups, stages, reporting periods and attribution. A familiar label on a screen was not always enough to establish the right interpretation.
We turned that operational knowledge into reporting logic that could generate a consistent workbook. DeeJay could then help staff request and work with the report, while the calculations followed the defined rules.
This combination is useful beyond education. An AI interface can make a report easier to obtain, while a defined calculation method makes it easier to check. The same principle applies to a sales pipeline, service workload or operating dashboard.
3. Prepare the next action for review
Follow-up work has another kind of preparation cost. A colleague needs to identify the cases that may need attention, check their status and decide what to say.
Our UBI work included filterable instalment worklists and email drafting. The worklists distinguish different situations, and drafts can be staged in authorised staff mailboxes. The responsible person can then review the case and the communication together.
The distinction between preparing work and making a decision is especially useful in finance. We kept invoice creation as a human responsibility in this workflow. Business-specific judgment was still needed, even when parts of the preparation could be assisted.
Measure the workflow people actually use
The next step is to measure each workflow on its own terms. For correspondence, that might mean time to find the right history and the number of corrections needed. For a report, it might mean preparation time, consistency and exceptions. For drafting, it might mean review time and how much of the first version is retained.
Those measures make an implementation easier to manage. They show whether a task has become more productive, where the assistant introduces extra checking and which improvement should come next.
The UBI experience has shaped IJK’s approach to AI implementation consulting: begin with recurring work, make the output usable in the existing workflow and assess the effect on the people doing the job. A series of well-chosen improvements can build meaningful operating capacity.