Scope drift
The symptom. The agent starts doing work it was not designed for.
How we handle it. Scope is documented at end of Day 1, enforced in the prompt and in code. The agent refuses out-of-scope inputs and logs the refusal.
Use case · lead
Half your team's day is form-to-form work.
Engineers re-type calculation outputs into report templates. Receptionists copy intake forms into the practice management system, and bookkeepers reconcile supplier invoices against PO numbers by hand. The team is competent and senior; the work is not.
The pain
30 to 60 percent of admin and back-office time in Australian SMEs goes to moving the same information from one form, system, or document to another. The owner cannot justify hiring more people for this work and cannot afford the team to keep doing it.
The mistake most businesses make
Reaching for general-purpose AI (Copilot, ChatGPT) and asking it to "help with the admin", which produces drafts that still need full review. The actual answer is a scoped agent that does one workflow end-to-end with explicit guardrails, an evaluation harness, and an escalation path for the cases it cannot handle. That is a build, not a chat session.
What Core Nova does differently
We have done this work. In an engineering consultancy. In a medical practice. Calculation-to-report and intake-to-note workflows where senior staff were spending hours on transcription that should not have been theirs to do. We will not name the clients without their consent and we will not publish numbers on the internet, but the work exists and the operators who built it are the same operators who will build yours.
We name the failure modes most AI consultancies do not. The First Workflow deliverable is built to handle all three.
Evaluation rot
The symptom. The agent's outputs degrade as the underlying data shifts and no one notices.
How we handle it. An evaluation set is built on Day 1 and re-run on a documented cadence with a named owner. Drift is detected, not discovered.
Escalation gap
The symptom. The agent silently handles cases that should have gone to a human.
How we handle it. Explicit escalation gates for any case outside the documented scope, with a named human owner and a defined SLA.
A$6,000 + GST
Four working days. First measurable improvement by week two. Payable in full on signature.
Book a scoping callWhat you leave with
- Process map of the function in scope.
- One workflow improvement deployed end-to-end.
- Runbook covering operation, escalation, and shutdown.
- Measurement note: before-and-after metric agreed in scope.
What happens after
The engagement ends at end of week two unless we both agree there is more value to capture. You leave with the improvement and the runbook either way.
If the first improvement returns the investment, we can scope a second workflow. Engagements can grow into multi-workflow deployments or ongoing oversight, but those conversations happen after the first improvement ships, not before.
Frequently asked
Administrative work that moves the same information between forms, systems, and documents. Engineers re-typing calculation outputs into report templates. Receptionists copying intake forms into the practice management system. Bookkeepers reconciling supplier invoices against PO numbers by hand.
Asking ChatGPT or Copilot to 'help with the admin' produces drafts that still need full review. The actual answer is a scoped agent that handles one workflow end to end with explicit guardrails, an evaluation harness, and an escalation path. That is a build, not a chat session.
By week two. The First Workflow engagement ships one production improvement in four working days. The improvement is measured against a before-and-after metric agreed on Day 1. If the metric does not move, we say so.
Yes. Calculation-to-report and intake-to-note workflows in an engineering consultancy and a medical practice. We will not name the clients without their consent and we will not publish numbers on the internet, but the work exists and the operators who built it are the same operators who will build yours.