Every vendor wants to show me a forecast. I do not want a forecast. I have people who forecast, and a model that cannot explain its reasoning to an audit committee is not a tool I can rely on for that.
What I want is help with the twenty small things that eat my team’s week. Reconciling wording across three versions of a board paper. Turning a messy supplier email into a clean summary. Checking whether a contract clause matches our standard terms.
01Boring is where the value is
None of this is impressive in a demo. All of it is real time saved, every week, with a person still in charge of the answer. That is the standard I hold these tools to: does the work get done better, and can I still explain it?
Show me the tool that saves my controller an hour on Thursday. Keep the one that predicts the quarter.
02Where this breaks
Anything that touches numbers going outside the building. We check every figure by hand, and we will for a long time yet.
List the five most repetitive tasks in your team’s week. Try a tool on the most boring one first, not the most interesting.