Does a Workflow Audit cost anything?

No. It is thirty minutes of joint work, not a paid assessment. It is also how scope gets defined honestly: a price offered before anyone has seen your workflow is a guess.

Is a Workflow Audit a sales call?

It is a working session with a sales consequence only if the numbers justify one. A real percentage of audits end with the advice to buy nothing, automate something boring, or fix a process first. That answer costs thirty minutes instead of a failed pilot.

How do I prepare for a Workflow Audit?

Pick the queue that hurts: the process eating measurable hours. Know roughly its weekly volume, who runs it, which systems it touches, and where the exceptions come from. Rough numbers are enough; the mapping is the audit’s job.

What is a Workflow Audit?

Q: What is a Workflow Audit?

A thirty-minute working session on one workflow: its volume, exceptions, systems, and decision points, mapped with the person who runs it. It answers where AI or automation would actually pay, or honestly, whether it would not. Any engagement scope and quote comes after it, never before.

The short answer

A Workflow Audit is a thirty-minute working session on one workflow: volume, exceptions, systems, and decision points, mapped with the person who runs it. It ends with a clear answer about where AI or automation would pay, a scope if one is justified, and the honest alternative, "this does not need us," when it is not. Nothing is quoted before it, because a price without seeing the workflow is a guess.

Every button on this site eventually leads to the same place, so the place deserves a plain description. Here is exactly what happens in the thirty minutes, and what does not.

What it is

The audit is the entry point of an embedded engagement and its cheapest insurance. The premise: most AI initiatives fail because they were designed far from the work, so the first contact should be with the work itself, not with a deck about it. One workflow, thirty minutes, the operator in the room.

What happens in the thirty minutes

01The workflow, walked. You describe the process as it actually runs: where work arrives, who touches it, what systems it crosses, where it waits. Not the org-chart version; the real one.
02The numbers, attached. Weekly volume, hours consumed, error and exception rates as best you know them. Rough is fine. The point is magnitude: what this queue costs.
03The exceptions, surfaced. Every workflow has a repetitive majority and a judgment minority. Finding that line is most of the design work, because the line decides what a system can safely take.
04The leverage, named. Where software or an agent would remove hours, and equally, where the honest fix is a process change or boring automation that needs no engagement at all.
05The verdict, plain. Worth building: you get a written scope with fixed duration. Not worth building: you get that sentence, and the reasons, in the same thirty minutes.

A price offered before seeing the workflow is a guess with a signature line. The audit exists so nobody has to sign a guess.

What you leave with

–A map of one workflow with its volume, exceptions, and decision points made explicit, useful whether or not anything gets built.
–A verdict with reasons. Where AI pays, where automation pays, where neither does.
–If justified: a fixed scope. What gets built, in how many weeks, ending in the full ownership handover. Quoted after the audit, never before.

What it is not

Not an "AI readiness assessment" with a scored PDF. Not a demo of things you did not ask about. Not a discovery phase sold by the month. And not a formality before a predetermined pitch: the audit that ends in "do not hire us" is a success, because a vendor who recommends AI for everything is describing their revenue model, not your operation.

How to prepare, in five minutes

Pick the queue that hurts most: support, intake, scheduling, back-office processing, or the spreadsheet holding your tools together. Know its rough weekly volume and who runs it. Bring that person if you can. Then either book the audit directly or start with the Discovery Agent, which conducts the same first conversation any hour of the day and books the audit at the end. Both live behind every button on this site.