Expert scenario

Spend senior hours on the projects you win, and produce an estimate faster than the competitor.

Systems integrators and implementation partners: qualifying a request, presales, effort estimation, proposal, project, support.

An engineer with a tablet checks equipment at a data-centre rack.

Key constraints

presales is paid for only by the projects you win
effort estimation depends on knowledge held by three people in the company
accumulated experience sits in project folders rather than in a usable form

Industry economics

An architect hour spent on presales for a lost project is a direct loss, and it never appears as its own line in a report.
An estimate made without a comparable past project misses — and the miss is paid out of margin.
Knowledge held by two people caps the number of parallel deals more tightly than headcount does.

Typical processes and pains

Symptom
Requests are qualified on gut feel.
Economic consequence
Senior specialists go into presales for projects that were never ours to win.
Do you know what share of presales hours went into lost projects last quarter?
Symptom
Effort estimates are assembled from scratch for every request.
Economic consequence
A similar project from a year ago is never found, and the estimate is made from memory.
Symptom
Standards and project write-ups sit in different folders and systems.
Economic consequence
A new hire asks about things already written down, distracting the people who are busy with projects.

Priority AI scenarios

Qualify a request before hours go into it

1Parse the request
2match against fit criteria
3find comparable past projects
4a fit assessment with reasoning

Inputs: Correspondence and calls about the request, project-fit criteria, the history of won and lost deals.
Output: A request record with a fit assessment and links to comparable projects.
Where the human stays: The decision to enter presales stays with the lead: the system supplies the grounds, it does not filter on its own.
Integrations: CRM, e-mail, project storage
Metrics: Win rate, presales hours per won project, time to decide on a request.
Limitations: The fit criteria have to be written down: while they live in the lead's head there is nothing to automate.

Find answers inside the company's accumulated material

1Index the material
2search by meaning
3answer with a link to the source document
4flag what is out of date

Inputs: Standards, instructions, solution write-ups, project reviews, access rights.
Output: An answer naming the document and section it came from.
Where the human stays: An answer without a source link is not shown; stale documents are flagged rather than rewritten automatically.
Integrations: Document storage, wiki, task tracker
Metrics: Time to find an answer, share of questions closed without asking a colleague, share of stale documents.
Limitations: Access rights are inherited from the sources: a restricted document does not become more available because it was indexed.

Where teams usually start

This is an observation across similar companies, not a universal recommendation: the order follows where your bottleneck actually is.

1Qualification is the usual start: that is where a mistake costs the most in hours.
2Search over accumulated material comes next, and it also relieves the architects.
3Effort estimation comes last: it needs project history in a usable form.
4The order follows where your senior hours actually go.

Industry systems and data

CRM
task tracker
document storage and wiki
e-mail and calendar
time tracking
monitoring systems

Risks and constraints

The material contains client project data under NDA — the access model is settled before indexing, not after.
Project-fit criteria are often unwritten: capturing them is the client's work, and it precedes automation.
Adoption: architects will not use a search that answers without citing a source.
Project history in the tracker may be incomplete — then matching against past experience is limited.

Which solutions apply

Frequently asked questions

Project material is under NDA. Can it be indexed?

Access rights are inherited from the sources: whoever could not see a document before will not see it in search either. The hosting model is chosen to fit your requirements, including running inside your own perimeter. Specific terms are fixed in the contract before work begins.

We have no formal qualification criteria. What then?

They usually exist but are not written down. During the assessment we reconstruct them from the history of won and lost projects and test them against it: if a criterion does not separate wins from losses, it is not a criterion.

Let's work through one workflow in integrators

Thirty to forty-five minutes on your specific case. If it isn't a fit, we'll say so on the call.