Show, don't write: record yourself doing the job once, and let the AI take notes
Ask an owner how they handle a new booking request and you get three lines. Watch them do it and there are fourteen steps, two exceptions and a spreadsheet nobody mentioned. Most of what you know about your business lives in your hands, not in a document. A new receptionist learns it by sitting next to you for a day. Your AI assistant can learn it the same way in ten minutes.
- Pick a task you did at least five times this week. A price enquiry, an order confirmation, an unsigned quote. Small and frequent beats big and rare.
- Record yourself doing it once and talk the whole time. A phone voice memo will do. Say what you look at and why: “if it's a repeat customer, I open their last invoice first.” Use a test customer if real names would show up on screen.
- Give the transcript to your assistant. Ask for numbered steps, a list of every decision you made, and a flag on each spot where you went by gut feeling.
- Answer the gut-feeling questions. “Why did this one get a discount?” is exactly the rule an agent would otherwise invent on its own.
- Test the steps on three cases from last week. Compare its answers with what you actually did. Every mismatch is a missing step.
Fourteen steps you never wrote down are fourteen places where an agent will guess. And if you can't talk through a task in ten minutes, you couldn't hand it to a person either. The recording just makes that visible.