Mira Chen ยท May 12, 2026
Twenty deployments later, the same pattern shows up every time. The customers who get a workable AI worker into production in two weeks are not the ones with the cleanest stacks or the largest budgets. They are the ones who pick the right first workflow.
This is the manual we hand the CIO before kickoff. It costs nothing to read and saves a lot of expensive mistakes.
Most companies want to start with whatever feels strategically interesting. Renewal forecasting. Demand-gen email sequences. The CEO's special project. Those almost never work as first workflows, because the success criteria are fuzzy and the data dependencies are deep.
Pick something boring instead. Vendor invoice reconciliation. Ticket triage. Onboarding kit provisioning. Three properties matter: