Somebody describes a painful manual process. Somebody else answers, three words: can AI solve this?
It’s true that AI can solve problems that could not be solved before, or could only be solved at enormous cost. Some processes were too messy to script or had just enough variance to make to make deterministic automation expensive.
But I think there is a misconception that can AI can do this trivially.
The setup
Setting up an agent to actually solve a problem on its own takes deliberate design. Before any of this can run, I’ve had to answer questions like these:
What knowledge does it need to handle your particular task?
Which skills does it require, and who writes and edits them?
Which parts need deterministic scripts instead of intelligence?
What does the detailed flow of the automation look like?
What can the agent not do, and where do the safeguards sit?
What systems does the runtime get access to? The ones it needs and importantly, none of the ones it doesn’t need?
Each of these is a topic in itself. Get one wrong and the automation either stops working or causes damage.
Say your team builds an agent that triages incoming support tickets. Getting it working on ten tickets probably takes an hour. Making it trustworthy on ten thousand tickets means feeding it your product docs, authoring skills for the edge cases, wrapping risky steps in deterministic scripts, and locking its access down to exactly one service.
So the answer to “Can AI Solve this?” is probably yes but it comes loaded with the same questions that always come with automating a process: how much will it cost?
Setup time comes first
You have to put time into using AI before you can use AI.
A prompt alone will not get you a working system. The prompt plus knowledge, skills, deterministic scripts, boundaries, and scoped access: that’s what you need to think about and write down first.
That setup is the price. And for some problems, it’s absolutely worth paying, for others it still might not be.
What to ask for
Next time somebody asks you this, give them an estimate of how long it will take to set it up, the reaction to that will tell you if the problem is worth solving.