Forget the procurement marathon. The fastest way to know if internal AI works is to run a real pilot in one week.
Most AI projects die in planning. Committees, requirements documents, data-science workstreams, and a timeline measured in quarters. By the time anything ships, the momentum is gone.There is a better way to find out whether a private knowledge layer will help your company: run a tight, real pilot on a single team. No rip-and-replace, no data scientists, no procurement marathon. Here is how to do it in five business days.
Before you start: pick well
The whole pilot hinges on two choices. Get these right and the rest is easy.Pick a team with a real, repeated knowledge problem. Onboarding-heavy teams, support, operations, and HR are ideal because the same questions come up every week.Pick a folder that already holds the answers. One well-maintained document library beats ten scattered sources.
Pick a team. Pick a folder. Live in five business days. That is the whole pilot.
The five-day playbook
Day 1, Connect. Point Open Sesame at the folder. Connect SharePoint, OneDrive, or Google Drive, or simply drag and drop. Nothing is migrated out of your control.Day 2, Organize. Tag documents by area, team, or repository so answers stay in context. Optional, but it sharpens results.Day 3, Set access. Map access by document area and user group. Access inherits from your existing permissions, so people only get answers from documents they could already open.Day 4, Test. Run real questions from the pilot team. Check that every answer is correct and cites the right source.Day 5, Go live. Invite the team. They sign in with their company email in the browser and start asking. Zero training.
- Questions answered correctly with a citation, as a share of all questions asked.
- Questions the team stopped routing to a manager or to HR.
- Time a new hire took to find a first-week answer, before and after.
What happens after the pilot
A successful pilot gives you a real, internal proof point: your own documents, answering your own people, with sources attached. From there you expand one team and one folder at a time, at whatever pace you choose. No big-bang rollout required.
I look forward to seeing how these developments will improve service levels and customer satisfaction in the freight industry!