Three stalled pilots and a board deadline, turned into a 90-day plan in four weeks.
A B2B industrial distributor with a new COO and board pressure turns three stalled AI pilots into a quantified 90-day execution plan.
Composite · IllustrativeComposite engagement. Representative of GAT's work; details illustrative. Not a real named client.
This composite is a $18M B2B industrial distributor with about 85 employees. A new COO had inherited three in-flight AI pilots, none clearly working, and a board that wanted an AI story before the next quarterly review. The ops team had quietly become the company's integration layer, and most of the AI and automation spend was unused or duplicative.
- 01 Four ops people spend about 30 hours a week manually re-entering supplier RFQ quotes, across 35 different PDF and spreadsheet templates, into the ERP. A 6% error rate drives costly misquoted reorders.
- 02 AP exception routing follows 23 repeatable decision patterns no one had ever written down, eating about 9 hours a week of the AP lead's time.
- 03 The ops team is the integration layer. When the prior head of ops left, three undocumented vendor workflows broke for two weeks and the knowledge walked out the door.
- 04 Tool sprawl across 14 paid AI and automation tools, most of it unused or duplicative.
- 05 Three AI pilots in flight, none clearly working, with a board that wants an AI story before the next quarterly review.
Map the decisions, not the org chart.
Built a decision-flow map across 8 stakeholders, a quantified waste table, an AI-eligible vs AI-ineligible workflow inventory, a 90-day execution plan, and a board-ready one-pager.
Find the two workflows that matter most.
Pinpointed RFQ data entry and AP exception routing as the two highest-leverage workflows, then separated what was genuinely AI-eligible from what only looked like it.
Name what lives only in people's heads.
Identified the undocumented vendor workflows living only in people's heads as a continuity risk, and scoped them for capture in the Build phase.
A roadmap the COO can defend.
Delivered a prioritized roadmap of which agents ship first, what stays human, and how to consolidate the redundant tool stack, framed at board altitude.
I'd inherited three pilots and a board deadline. In four weeks I had a map of where the waste actually was and a plan I could put in front of the board, not another pilot.
Three stalled pilots is a diagnosis problem, not a tooling problem. Start with the map.
If you have AI work in flight and no clear read on what is actually working, the audit is the first move. Four weeks to a plan you can defend.