YOUR OBJECTIVE COMES FIRST
Customer document review
Choose a useful first investment, with a reason to proceed.
Maryland Commerce highlights life sciences, cybersecurity and IT, advanced manufacturing, logistics and artificial intelligence among its key industries. A useful scoping example is research-support project intake. Follow a project brief, approved source collection and access request through the work with project leads, information owners and technical support. Project participation does not automatically authorize access to every research document. Which source material is each participant permitted to use?
Maryland Department of Commerce: industry context ↗01Start with a decision or recurring task
Identify who does the work, what they need from the output and what happens when it is wrong. Compare an AI approach with configuration, rules or a process change. An assessment should explain the problem worth solving before proposing a model or a tool.
02Check the information the idea depends on
Review representative documents, source permissions, record quality and access to existing systems. Identify missing inputs and the person authorized to resolve them. A large document collection is not automatically a usable knowledge base, and a system login is not the same as an approved integration. Working example: A redacted review packet and decision checklist.
03Build a baseline people can inspect
Record current handling time, review effort, error types and transaction volume. Estimate operating costs alongside implementation and support. Use a small evaluation set to test the proposal against this baseline, including incomplete records and cases where the system should stop for help. For research-support project intake, agree how project leads, information owners and technical support contribute where those functions are involved.
04Agree on who can approve the next step
Name the business sponsor, process owner, technical reviewer and people who will use the result. Set a bounded pilot, acceptance criteria and a stop decision. The roadmap should make dependencies visible rather than turn every possible use case into an immediate commitment. Review check: A reviewer can explain the evidence required for each decision.