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Service 03

The manual step, removed.

Most businesses run on a handful of invisible tasks somebody does by hand every day — retyping an invoice, sorting an inbox, chasing a number for a Monday report. Individually trivial, collectively a full-time job.

Timeline
4–8 weeks
Suited to
Operations with a high-volume repetitive task

Typically starts at

from$3,000· Premium

Priced in your currency and fixed in writing before work starts. Change the region in the navigation to see local pricing.

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01The problem

Why the manual work survives

It is never quite painful enough to fix and never quite simple enough to automate with rules. The data is messy, the exceptions are real, and traditional automation breaks on the first unexpected format.

  • Rules cannot cope with the input

    Invoices in forty layouts, emails in free text, forms filled in wrongly. Deterministic parsing handles the clean 60% and dumps the rest on a person.

  • The systems do not speak

    The data exists in three places and a human is the integration layer, copying between them and introducing a typo every hundred rows.

  • Nobody trusts a black box

    Automation that cannot show its working does not get adopted, because the first unexplained mistake ends the experiment.

02Our approach

How we approach it

We use models for the judgement — reading messy input, classifying, extracting — and ordinary deterministic code for everything else. Most of a reliable smart system is not AI, and pretending otherwise is how these projects fail.

Measure before automating

We time the task and count the volume first. Some of what people ask us to automate is not worth automating, and we would rather say so.

Judgement where it earns its place

A model reads the document and classifies the case; validated code does the arithmetic, the writes and the routing.

Confidence-gated

High-confidence cases flow straight through. Anything uncertain goes to a review queue with the reason attached, so exceptions are handled rather than hidden.

Auditable end to end

Every record keeps its input, its decision and its confidence, so you can answer 'why did it do that' months later.

Where the model sits, and where it does notMESSY INPUTInputInvoices, email, forms —forty layouts, free textRead and classifyThe model, doing the onething rules cannotValidateOrdinary deterministic code —schemas, arithmetic, rulesCONFIDENCE GATEStraight throughWritten to your systemsReview queueWith the reason attachedLOWAudit logEvery record keeps its input, its decision and its confidence scoreMonitoringAlerts on failure, drift and backlog — it stops rather than guessing
Where the model sits, and where it does not

Messy input — invoices in many layouts, free-text email, imperfectly filled forms — is read and classified by a model. Everything after that point is ordinary deterministic code: the extracted values are validated, then a confidence gate splits the flow. High-confidence cases pass straight through to your systems. Anything uncertain goes to a review queue with the reason attached, so exceptions are handled rather than hidden. Every record keeps its input, decision and confidence score in an audit log.

03Deliverables

Exactly what you receive.

No vague line items. This is the list that goes into the agreement.

Analysis

  • Workflow mapping with timings and volumes
  • Sample set covering the real edge cases
  • Accuracy targets and confidence thresholds
  • Honest assessment of what is not worth automating

System

  • Extraction and classification pipeline
  • Integrations with the systems involved
  • Review queue for low-confidence cases
  • Audit log with decisions and confidence scores
  • Alerting on failure, drift and backlog

Handover

  • Accuracy report against the sample set
  • Operating dashboard for volume and exceptions
  • Runbook and rollback procedure
  • Training for the team running it

04How it runs

Five stages, each with a clear exit.

  1. 01

    Mapping

    We follow the work as it actually happens, including the undocumented steps people invented to cope. The real process is never the one on the slide.

  2. 02

    Sampling

    A representative set including the awkward cases, labelled so accuracy can be measured rather than asserted.

  3. 03

    Build

    Pipeline, integrations and review queue, evaluated against the sample throughout.

  4. 04

    Shadow run

    It runs alongside the humans without touching anything, so you can compare outputs before trusting it.

  5. 05

    Cutover

    Switched on with monitoring, thresholds and a rollback path, then tuned once real volume arrives.

05Related work

How this looks in practice.

06Questions

Intelligent Automation, answered.

Intelligent Automation

Let us look at your project.

Send the brief — or just the problem. We will tell you what we would do and what it would cost.