What an AI workflow audit actually looks like

Most consulting engagements start with a discovery deck. Ours starts with a notebook, a video call, and the question: what's the slowest thing your team does every week, and roughly how many hours does it eat? Everything that follows is downstream of that one question. This piece walks through the rest of it — every meeting, every artifact, every decision — so you know exactly what you're buying when we say the words 'two-week audit'.

Why two weeks, not two months

Traditional consulting firms run 12-week audits because their billing model rewards length. Ours runs two weeks because that's how long the actual work takes. Day 1 we meet your team. Day 14 you have a prioritised roadmap with three named workflows we'd ship in the following month. Anyone who tells you it takes longer is either selling you a deck or padding the bill.

Day 1–3 — discovery

We sit with three to five people on your team — typically the founder, one operator who knows the day-to-day, and one engineer if you have one. Each conversation is 60–90 minutes. We don't ask about your company's mission. We ask about Tuesdays. What did you do last Tuesday? What did you copy from one tab to another? Where did you wait for something to load? Where did you say 'I really need to fix this' and then not fix it?

Out of those three days we walk away with what we call a workflow inventory — usually 30 to 60 distinct manual processes, each tagged with who runs it, how often, and a rough hours-per-week estimate. None of it is sanitised. None of it is in slides.

Day 4–7 — prioritisation

We rank every workflow on two axes: hours saved per week if we automated it, and shipping complexity. The shipping complexity score is our experience-driven guess at how long it'd take a team like ours to build the agent. Most workflows fall into one of three buckets:

• —Trivial — one Zapier zap or a single n8n flow. Often days, not weeks.
• —Medium — a custom Claude agent with a small interface. 1–3 weeks.
• —Heavy — a full multi-step pipeline with state, retries, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. 3–6 weeks.

We rank workflows by hours-saved divided by complexity, which gives us a clean ROI score per workflow. Then we hand you the top 10 ranked, with our top 3 picks bolded.

Day 8–10 — prototyping

This is the part most audits skip. We don't just hand you a list — we build a working prototype of the top-ranked workflow against your real data, in front of you, in a single working session. You watch us do it. You see the prompts we write. You see the agent fail and iterate. You see how long it actually takes (usually two to four hours, not the eight weeks a vendor would quote).

By the end of day 10 you have a runnable prototype on a private link. You can show it to your team. You can run it against more data. You can break it. You can do all the diligence you want before deciding whether to commission the full build.

Day 11–14 — roadmap delivery

We hand you a single document. Not a deck, not a pitch — a markdown doc you can paste into Notion. It contains:

• —The full workflow inventory with our hours-per-week estimates
• —The ranked top 10 with shipping complexity scores
• —The prototype link and instructions for running it yourself
• —A 6-week build plan for the top 3 workflows, with prices
• —A list of tools we'd use and why
• —A clean handoff path so you can run any of this yourself if you'd rather

And then we go away for a week so you can think about it without us in your inbox. If you decide to commission the build, we can usually start within ten days. If you decide to run it yourself, the doc is yours to keep.

What the audit costs

Five thousand dollars. Fixed. No add-ons, no scope creep, no 'let's extend it'. If we can't deliver what's in this article in two weeks, we refund you. We've done dozens of these — that contingency has never been used.

If you're sitting on workflows that are obviously eating hours and you've been putting off the conversation about what to do, this is the cheapest way to get a real answer. Worst case you walk away with a doc you can hand to any other vendor.