Supporting AI and automation deployment for a global student-placement business
A globally-operating student-placement business wanted to deploy AI and automation across its operations - but first needed to understand how those operations actually ran.
The brief
In a business operating across a network spanning several countries, a lot of what actually makes the operation work tends to live in individual people’s heads rather than in any documented process - shaped by local practice, built up over time, and never quite the same from one country to the next. Deploying AI and automation onto operations like that without first understanding them properly risks automating inconsistency rather than removing it. Support the business through AI and automation deployment across a network spanning several countries, in a way that made the underlying process consistent first.
Our approach
Through a Torque advisory subscription, we started by mapping the business’s processes to surface the tacit knowledge behind how it actually operated - engaging directly with the people doing the work across the network, since much of what mattered wasn’t written down anywhere for us to simply review. That mapping gave us a genuine, current picture of the business rather than an idealised version of how it was supposed to run, and let us prioritise where AI and automation would actually make the most difference. From there we began to deploy AI and automation across the business’s globally-distributed operations end to end - supporting the build and rollout itself, not just handing over a set of recommendations for the business to implement alone.
The outcome
AI and automation is now actively being deployed across the business’s international operations, with the process knowledge behind them made explicit for the first time. What used to live in individual people’s heads, and vary from one country to the next, is now documented and applied consistently across the whole network - giving the business’s leadership a clear view of how the business actually runs, for the first time, alongside the AI and automation now built on top of it.
