The AI Influence: For the Practitioner

About This Book

The AI Influence, Volume 1: For the Practitioner

Your methods were written for software that does what it is told. AI does not.

A requirement that assumes the system is right every time. A project estimated as if the scope were fixed. A retention schedule with nothing to say about a model, a prompt or a training set. Nobody involved is careless. The method simply does not ask.

This book gives the new questions a place. It is written for working practitioners and organized by discipline, because that is how people are organized:

Business analysis: requirements for probabilistic systems, data readiness, generative AI, acceptance and monitoring, responsible AI

Project management: staged planning, evidence gates, estimating under uncertainty, vendors and foundation models, benefits realization

Transformation: maturity, strategy tied to outcomes, operating model, governance, people and change

Records and information management: auto-classification, metadata extraction, retention and legal hold, governing AI records

Data governance: data quality for training and inference, lineage, permitted use, datasets as governed assets

Business process re-engineering: discovering how the process really runs, redesigning around AI and human judgment, measuring what changed

Intelligent document processing: capture, classification, extraction, confidence and exceptions, human review design

Each part assumes you already practice the discipline and adds only what AI requires. Every chapter has the ideas, a worked example from an ordinary business with round numbers, the key terms and a short self-check. No vendors are named and no product is favored. Where the law matters, the principle is stated so that it outlasts the statute.

Read the part for your own discipline first, then the neighbors. Most AI work fails at the seams between disciplines, and the analyst who understands the project manager’s gates is the one who catches the problem early.

It is a working book. Read it with a project in mind.

About the author. TJ Donnelly has spent more than 20 years as a business process and business systems analyst in banking, government and transit, taking projects from requirements through delivery to hand-over. He is the founder of Applied IT Solutions, a Toronto consultancy that helps organizations put AI to work on their documents, data and processes. Volume 2, For the Executive Suite, addresses the leaders who must decide.