Monday morning, the system is on and nobody trusts it
Monday morning, the computer at the far end of the room runs the automation for the first time, and the person who has always done that job is sitting in their place doing it anyway, like every Monday, on the same cases
By the end of the morning there are two results on the same pile of documents, theirs and the machine's, and they get looked at side by side
First you work in duplicate, and that's what turns up the cases nobody had mentioned
In the first phase the automation runs alongside the person on the same cases, it writes nothing final, or it writes where you can check it, and every day what it did gets compared with what the person who knows the job did
It looks like wasted time, and instead it's the phase that decides whether the rest works, because that's where the things that never came up in conversation turn up
The supplier who writes the taxable amount in a spot all of their own, that one customer's case which has been handled differently for fifteen years, the footnote that flips the sign of an amount, the case where you call somebody before going ahead instead of going ahead
Nobody is hiding them, it's simply that whoever has done that job for years no longer sees them as rules, they live them as normality, and they tell you about them only when they find them printed on a sheet in front of them
If you want a close look at why it always happens, there's a guide of its own, nobody can explain how it's done, they just do it
Then it works, but it asks permission
When the two results start to match and the differences that remain can be explained one by one, you move to the second step, the automation really does the work but before writing it stops and asks for confirmation
The person sees what the system understood, the document on one side and the filled-in fields on the other, and says yes or corrects it
It's dull work, that much is true, but it only lasts a while, it isn't forever, and every no the system gets is a piece of information that ends up inside the rules
Something else happens here as well, less technical and no less important, whoever is going to use that system stops seeing it as a black box, because they watch it work every day and learn when it gets it right and when it doesn't
In the end it goes on its own, but not on everything
The third step is autonomy, and it covers the simple cases, the ones that repeat identically, the ones where the checks add up by themselves
The rest keeps going through a person, and that isn't a fallback, it's the right design, because an automation built well would rather stop than guess, and it puts the odd case in a queue with the document in front of it and the reason it didn't carry on
Where the line falls between what runs on its own and what stops is yours to decide, and it's better decided with the numbers in front of you after you've watched the system work, not beforehand on a whiteboard
The subject is told in full in assisted or autonomous automation
Things turn up in the first stretch, and that's normal
Whoever tells you everything runs smoothly on day one has never started anything up
In the first weeks the exceptions come out, out comes the document nobody had ever seen in that shape, out comes the screen that behaves differently when a field is empty
The difference between a rollout that works and one that ends badly isn't how many surprises turn up, they're more or less always the same, it's whether the system finds them while somebody is watching or afterwards, once it has already written two hundred records convinced it had understood
And it's also why Muffin Suite works on a fee agreed before we start, with the assisted rollout and the fixes already inside it, instead of charging for the surprises as if they were somebody's fault, the page on how it works covers this
What you need in-house that day
You need little, but that little is really needed, a person who knows the process and has a few minutes a day to look at the comparisons and say where the system got it badly wrong, and the willingness to let the two things run together for a while, without demanding that the manual work be switched off on the first day