The AI Field Guide

What AI Can
Actually Do.

Nine capabilities of AI inside a real business — from answering employee questions to running silent, autonomous workflows. Each card is what the AI does, plus one concrete example of it in action.

Nine Capabilities
From Simple Q&A to Full Autonomy.

The list follows a natural progression — every capability builds on the one before it. Most businesses start at the top and grow into the deeper capabilities as their needs mature.

01 — Answering Internal Questions
Every Company Has Answers Buried in Documents Nobody Reads.

An internal search engine and knowledge base for your team. The AI reads across handbooks, wikis, SharePoint, and PDFs to answer questions instantly — and cites the exact source so people trust the answer.

HR & policy questions answered without pulling a manager into it
Sales enablement: "What's our answer to competitor X?" in seconds
Onboarding co-pilot for new hires — day-one productivity, not week-four
Every response cites the page and paragraph it came from
Retrieval-Augmented GenerationVector searchClaude APICitations
knowledge.internal LIVE
HR ASSISTANT · Karen L.
KL
What is our parental leave policy for secondary caregivers?
M
Mirror Assistant
Secondary caregivers receive 6 weeks of fully paid leave, which must be taken within the first 12 months following the child's arrival. This applies to birth, adoption, or foster placement.
Employee_Handbook_2026.pdf · page 47
Related: primary caregiver Adoption assistance
02 — Document Drafting & Reviewing
Turn Rough Notes Into a Finished First Draft in Seconds.

The AI takes raw inputs — deal terms, requirements, meeting notes — and produces polished first drafts against your pre-approved templates. A human signs off, so quality stays high while cycle time drops.

Contracts, SOWs, and SLAs drafted from bullet points against your templates
Proposal and pitch decks generated from a discovery call transcript
Meeting-minutes auto-summarized with owners, dates, and decisions extracted
Legal & brand review notes flagged inline for the human editor
LLM draftingTemplate libraryStyle-guide tuningHuman-in-loop
drafts.internal / new-sla 4.2s
Input · deal terms
• Client: Acme Retail
• Response SLA: 4 hrs
• Uptime: 99.9%
• Term: 24 months
• Auto-renew: yes
• Fee: $8,400 / mo
Draft output
SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT
1. Response Time. Support requests will receive a first response within four (4) hours during business days.
2. Uptime. The Service shall maintain 99.9% monthly uptime, excluding scheduled maintenance.
3. Term. This Agreement shall commence on the Effective Date and continue for 24 months [legal review].
Drafted from Master SLA Template v3.2
1 note for legal
03 — Persistent Context & Memory
The AI Remembers Every Conversation So Your People Don’t Have To.

Vector databases store past interactions, decisions, and preferences. When an account manager opens a client file six months later, the AI surfaces exactly what they need to walk into that meeting prepared.

Client briefs that recap history, preferences, and open issues before every call
Handoffs between reps preserve context — no "let me get up to speed" moments
Long-running projects retain decisions and rationale across months of work
Preferences (channel, tone, cadence) surface automatically per contact
Vector databasesSemantic memoryTimeline synthesisZoho CRM
crm / Nowak Manufacturing SYNCED
NM
Nowak Manufacturing
Anna Nowak · VP Operations · Client since 2023
EMAIL TZ: CET
MEMORY TIMELINE
Q3 2025 · Complained about billing delays. Wants monthly invoices in EUR.
Q4 2025 · Requested weekly status reports every Friday morning.
Q1 2026 · Praised on-time renewal. Interested in adding a second entity next quarter.
Now · Opening this file — call scheduled 3:00 PM CET. Prep brief ready.
04 — Document & Compliance Auditing
Flag Risk Before It Becomes a Legal Problem.

The AI reads incoming contracts and reports against your Standard Operating Procedures, playbooks, or regulatory checklists — then flags every clause that violates policy with a reference back to the exact rule that’s at odds.

Vendor contracts checked against procurement SOPs before you sign
Financial reports audited against internal controls and materiality thresholds
Marketing copy screened for regulated-industry compliance language
Every flag cites the SOP section and the violating passage side by side
SOP embeddingsClause detectionDiff highlightingAudit trail
audit / vendor-contract-4211.pdf 1 FLAG
CONTRACT PREVIEW
Section 4.1 — The parties agree to renew this Agreement on identical terms unless notice is given 30 days prior.
Section 4.2 — Vendor may raise prices up to 10% annually without prior notice to Client.
Section 4.3 — Client shall have the right to audit invoices within 60 days of receipt.
SOP VIOLATION
Section 4.2 allows a 10% annual price increase. Procurement SOP § 7.3 caps annual increases at 5%.
Recommended action: request amendment before signing.
05 — Proprietary Security Guardrails
Deploy AI on Sensitive Data Without Leaking a Byte.

The AI runs on private cloud instances with strict data-loss-prevention filters. Sensitive fields — patient IDs, PII, financials, credentials — are redacted before the data ever reaches an analysis layer or a foundation model outside your walls.

HIPAA / SOC 2 / GDPR-compliant deployments on private AWS or Azure
Automatic redaction of PII, PHI, and PCI fields before any external API call
Every prompt and response logged with full audit trail for compliance review
Role-based access control per data class and per user
Private cloudDLP filtersField-level redactionAudit logs
dlp / patient-batch-0912 HIPAA
Patient records · 7 of 218
47 fields protected
Patient
SSN
Medical ID
Diagnosis (for model)
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Type-2 diabetes, HbA1c 8.2
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Hypertension, uncontrolled
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Post-op recovery, day 12
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Chronic pain, opioid-free plan
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Migraine, chronic · monthly prophylaxis
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
Asthma, moderate persistent
█████████
███-██-████
MRN-██████
CKD stage 3 · nephrology f/u
All PII redacted before model call · audit logged
06 — Lead Qualification & Management
Every Lead Scored, Briefed, and First-Touched Before Your Rep Sees It.

Behavioral signals — site visits, downloads, LinkedIn signals, company size — get scored against your ideal customer profile. The AI drafts a first-touch email tailored to the prospect’s industry and queues it for the rep to send with one click.

Real-time scoring against your ICP — hot leads routed instantly
Prospect research auto-run: LinkedIn, company news, funding, tech stack
Personalized first email referencing their industry bottleneck
Rep gets a queued draft, not a raw form submission
ICP scoringEnrichment APIPersonalized outreachZoho CRM
crm / new-lead / mfujimoto HOT
MF
Marc Fujimoto
VP of IT · Tokamak Systems · 512 employees
92
Lead Score
Signals detected
Downloaded "Zoho ERP Buyer’s Guide" · 3 min ago
Company posted "$4.2M Series B" 6 days ago
Title match: VP IT · industry match: manufacturing
DRAFT EMAIL QUEUED FOR REP
"Marc — congrats on the Series B. Most manufacturing IT teams hit the same wall around 500 people: ERP consolidation. Happy to walk you through what worked at …"
07 — System & Database Interoperability
Read Messy Documents. Write Clean Records.

Beyond reading, the AI writes. It pulls structured data out of unstructured inputs — PDFs, emails, scanned invoices, images — and pushes it into your CRM, ERP, or accounting system via API. Fields mapped, records matched, transactions logged.

Invoice OCR → line items → expense record in QuickBooks or Zoho Books
Email attachments parsed and filed against the right vendor/customer record
Handwritten forms digitized and posted to the correct entity in your CRM
Every write is idempotent, audited, and reversible
OCR + LLM extractionREST APIsZoho / QuickBooksIdempotency keys
bridge / invoice-INV-4211.pdf LOGGED
Source PDF
Acme Supply Co.
Invoice #INV-4211
Date: 05/12/2026
PO: PO-9083

Line 1: Ball bearings
  40 @ $12.50 = $500
Line 2: Shipping
  $47.00
Tax (8.25%): $45.13
Total: $592.13
Zoho Books Record
VENDOR 
Acme Supply Co. • matched
BILLPO-9083
Ball bearings40$500.00
Shipping$47.00
Tax 8.25%$45.13
TOTAL $592.13
Wrote to Zoho Books · matched vendor · PO reconciled
1.8s
08 — Multi-Step Task Planning
Give the AI a Goal. It Runs the Whole Playbook.

Agentic AI acts as a project manager. Give it a goal — "onboard vendor X" or "close the books for March" — and it plans the sequence, executes each step, evaluates the result, and adjusts the plan on the fly if a step fails.

Vendor onboarding: contract, ID verification, IT provisioning, CRM entry
Month-end close: reconciliations, reports, approvals, filings
Employee offboarding: access revocation, exit interview, final payroll
Self-correcting: retry on failure, escalate to a human when stuck
Agentic loopsTool usePlan-execute-reflectHuman escalation
agent / onboard-tokamak-systems RUNNING
GOAL
Onboard new vendor: Tokamak Systems (US · manufacturing)
Sub-tasks · 3 of 6 complete
Draft NDA and MSA against template
2m ago
Send for e-signature via DocuSign
1m ago
Verify W-9 and beneficial ownership
30s ago
Create IT accounts & distribute credentials
RUNNING
Create CRM record and vendor tile
QUEUED
Log go-live date & notify AM
QUEUED
09 — Autonomous Triggering & Workflow
Workflows That Run in the Background. No Prompts. No Dashboards. No Humans.

Living inside Zoho, Salesforce, or SAP, the AI listens for system events — a customer cancels, an invoice arrives, a threshold trips — then executes the full downstream workflow silently. No prompt. No dashboard. Just the outcome.

Churn intervention triggered the moment a customer clicks "cancel"
Auto-generated dunning sequences that adapt to payment history
SLA breach recovery: refund, apology, escalation — all before the human sees it
Every action logged and reversible — no runaway loops, ever
Event-driven agentsZoho Deluge / FlowCircuit breakersFull audit trail
zoho / event-log / churn-agent COMPLETED
TRIGGER · 09:14:07
Customer tsavva@peak.co clicked "Cancel Subscription" in Zoho
Cascade · auto-executed
Pulled 3-year usage history · identified 40% drop-off in Q1
+0.9s
Diagnosed root cause: switched to a competitor for advanced reporting
+1.4s
Generated retention offer: 3 months free on Business tier + reporting add-on
+2.1s
Email dispatched to customer with one-click accept link
+2.6s
If no response in 24h: high-priority call scheduled with AM · pending
t + 24h
Total run · 2.6 seconds · zero human touches
audit id: e7f2ac

Curious which of these fits your business?

Every AI engagement starts with Scope — a fixed-fee blueprint that maps which of these capabilities is actually worth building for you.

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