Discovery and interview: map the work before you change it
How AiAx Discovery and Interview turn role-based conversations into a reviewed process picture and a pilot you can evaluate.
Start with the people who know the work. AiAx Discovery turns role-based interviews into a reviewed as-is picture and a practical roadmap toward agent-supported workflows. Agents help uncover the work. Your people confirm the picture. Discovery does not automatically build agents, and it does not claim that one conversation can infer an entire business.
How Discovery runs
Discovery moves through six beats: Scope, Listen, Map, Validate, Prioritise, Pilot.
- Scope - agree the business area, process owner, outcome, participants and source material needed.
- Listen - let each role explain triggers, handovers, tools, exceptions and recurring friction.
- Map - connect accounts into a draft as-is picture of steps, roles and systems, with gaps and disagreements kept visible.
- Validate - reviewers correct, confirm or reject findings before anything is treated as confirmed.
- Prioritise - compare candidate workflows on value, readiness, dependencies and risk.
- Pilot - name a first working workflow with an owner, agent mandate, human review and a result to measure. Building integrations and deploying agents is implementation work, scoped separately.
Inside the interview room
AiAx Interview is the conversation layer Discovery uses. In the interview room, a brief sets purpose, topics and who is invited. The participant speaks; the interviewer follows an answer into useful detail instead of collecting short list replies.
Depending on the interview template, the room can combine:
- spoken or written follow-up questions
- Excalidraw diagrams for process maps the participant can correct together with the interviewer
- quizzes or multiple-choice prompts only where that template includes them (not every interview uses them)
- analysis surfaces that separate what was said from interpretation, missing detail and questions to revisit
- participant validation, so people confirm or correct the record before it is treated as agreed evidence
Reviewed conversations, workshops and supporting sources feed Discovery’s broader map and roadmap. A person owns the next decision.
A concrete illustration
Imagine a facilities intake process. An operations lead opens an interview brief and says:
Walk me through the last time a service request got stuck between allocation and field work.
Follow-up questions surface who notices the delay, which system holds the status, and where the handover breaks. Where the template supports it, the same session can sketch the handover on an Excalidraw map or use a short multiple-choice check on status ownership. Analysis then marks contradictions and missing evidence. The process owner validates before anything is confirmed. The shortlist compares candidate workflows and names a first pilot with an owner and a result to measure.
Illustrative workflow using sample information. Not a documented customer case.
Decision checklist
Before you treat a Discovery finding as ready for a pilot, confirm all of the following:
- Scope, owner and interview plan are agreed
- Interview evidence has been reviewed (said vs interpreted vs still open)
- Participants have validated the draft picture, including any Excalidraw map from the session
- Unresolved gaps are listed, not hidden
- One first pilot has a named owner and a measurable result
- Agent build, integrations and production change remain out of scope until that pilot brief is approved
