A Breakdown on Transforming a Manual 7Hr Process into a 38Min Asset.”

The Diagnosis:

A Media Production Agency ($14M-$17M revenue, 36 global staff) faced a critical operational bottleneck

One of their core value-creating processes, the expert-led curation of high-value scenes from raw content was both one of their greatest competitive advantages as well as their primary bottleneck to growth.

This mission-critical process, which relied entirely on the un-codified, gut knowledge of their senior Channel Managers, was a brutal, 7.5-hour+, manual process for every new show.

It was a perfect, but fundamentally unscalable, "human-intensive" workflow. The very "secret sauce" that made them successful was now preventing them from reaching the next order of magnitude.

This was a process that they’d been trying to systemize for years as they knew that shows that had scenes curated beforehand performed better on their channels, however it was something that the Channel Management team found difficult to consistently do.

This is what led them to begin their search for AI solutions in the market.

The RAG Hammer

Their search for the right solutions wasn’t a simple one, as they had to look through a vast market of options from consulting firms, to AI agencies, and others.

The knew they couldn’t just use a regular tool on the market as their process was too proprietary and specialized that a regular tool could execute on

In their search they found that that many of the solutions that were recommended to them seemed to be solutions that were on-size-fits-all and not a true system that could solve their core problem, which was having a system that made the knowledge which was trapped in the minds of their best experts in a new scalable format.

However a key distinction they were also looking for was a way in which that format could be delivered was in an event-driven format. Where the AI could execute automatically based on a new business event, instead of being query-driven.

Intelligence System Matrix:

On our first conversation I was immediately able to see that they needed an Event-Driven Strategic-Execution Intelligence System.

The Intelligence Audit

There was a sense of relief after they’d heard out solution, as they had finally found a source that understood their need for architectural fit. So we began the first phase of our engagement: an Intelligence Audit.

This was a structured 3 week sprint to assess the foundations of their data, build the architectural and technical blueprint of the asset, design the new process which their channel managers would follow, and determine the value created with this new system.

This process was designed around unlocking massive amounts of clarity, and mitigating the risks of engaging in an AI project that could fail which could cost $75k-$500k in losses from poor AI performance or missed opportunity.

The Intelligence System

After designing performing the Intelligence Audit and designing the core blueprints for this engagement it was clear we were sitting a massive opportunity to unlock a large amount of potential for the company, so we moved into Phase II: Intelligence System Engagement.

This was a 4-month engagement to design an architecturally fit prototype and then operationally harden it for production in the real-world company environment.

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The Mandate

Design a custom, event-driven system that could:

• Encode expert knowledge into repeatable, scalable workflows

• Trigger automatically as new shows/episodes landed (not just on-demand)

• Deliver high-fidelity scene analysis without removing human judgment </aside>

New AI-Augmented Process:

The Intelligence System transformed the time it took to perform a Content Analysis & Selection of a new show:

Metric Old Process New AI System Episodes Analyzed 12 12 Human Hours 7.5+ 0.5 AI Processing Time N/A ~38 min Efficiency Gain — 87% ↓ Expert Fidelity (Match Rate) N/A 95%

Channel Managers now analyze 10x the shows, with 1/10th the manual effort.

Human-AI Collaboration Process:

The Asymmetric Outcome:

The Intelligence System now gives them an advantage that allows them to punch 50x more than their weight.

The vision of being able to handle new shows with backlogs of over 6,000 episodes was once a nightmare that meant having to hire and train a huge force of manpower (Channel Managers/Editors) or risk leaving thousands of scenes missed due to human error.

This vision is something that is now operationally in sight as all the team has to due is watch a portion of the show 5%-10% to build the rubric and from there the rubrics can be used by the to analyze the remaining 90%-95% unlocking non-linear scalability.

This system also allows them to position their company as a market leader in new tech enablement, which allows them to secure more lucrative deals as many of their Production Studios were questioning on their usage of AI.

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AI is only as powerful as the process it multiplies:

• Blueprint-first, architecture-driven processes unlock compounding advantage.

• Tool-first shortcuts simply break. </aside>