Simulate a customer engagement for a small support team. Its staff spend time locating policy documents and drafting ticket responses. Your task is to discover whether AI helps, build a bounded pilot, and hand it over. Use synthetic tickets and clearly label the engagement and business results as simulated.
Discovery brief
Interview a peer acting as the support lead, or write explicit assumptions when no participant is available. Record users, current steps, frequency, pain points, data owners, permissions, and excluded actions. Measure a small manual baseline with five example tickets. Separate measured timings from estimates.
Agree on pilot criteria before building: grounded response quality, successful permission checks, human review requirements, acceptable latency, and a budget. The initial pilot drafts answers; a person remains responsible for sending them.
Architecture and integration
Draw the flow from authenticated user through the application, ticket API, document retrieval, and model provider. Describe where data is stored and which identity checks each boundary enforces. Compare a search-only alternative with retrieval-assisted drafting. Explain why the proposed complexity is justified.
Use two synthetic customer accounts and distinct document collections. Ensure the requesting identity limits retrieval and ticket access before information reaches the model. Do not rely on a prompt to enforce tenant isolation.
Pilot delivery
- Implement a sandbox connector with explicit timeout and retry behavior.
- Create representative acceptance cases with the simulated customer, including unsupported questions and inaccessible documents.
- Run a supervised pilot, collect feedback, and record failed cases rather than removing them from the report.
- Test disabling model calls while keeping manual support usable.
- Rehearse a handoff with someone who did not build the system.
Acceptance checks
- An account cannot retrieve another account’s documents or read its tickets, including when IDs are guessed.
- Provider outages return a usable fallback and a diagnosable trace without sensitive data.
- The pilot report compares the agreed criteria with results and clearly identifies the sample size.
- Rollback instructions can be followed by the receiving operator.
- The handoff recipient can configure the sandbox, run a sample request, identify a failed integration, and disable the AI feature using the runbook.
Deliverables
Submit a discovery brief, architecture decision record, integrated prototype, acceptance matrix, pilot review, and operational runbook. Include ownership, monitoring, escalation, rollback, and user training. Present a short recommendation: expand the pilot, revise it, or stop it, with supporting evidence.
This exercise demonstrates the delivery process. It does not establish real customer ROI or certify production readiness.