Turn an executive's AI mandate into a scoped pilot

Using the support scenario, explain the goal behind the COO's request and check both targets against the team's figures and rules, showing your arithmetic. Propose a first pilot: which email types, the automation level and human checkpoint, success and stop measures, a comparison, and a decision date. Then write the short reply you would send the COO, saying what you will and will not commit to and why, and say what you would tell the support team.

The company, team, figures, rules, and prices are fictional.

You lead customer support at a regional internet service provider that sells home broadband. Your team has 45 agents who answer phone, chat, and email, plus 3 team leads and 2 QA specialists. This morning the chief operating officer (COO) wrote to you:

The board wants to hear our AI plan. By the end of next quarter I want AI answering every customer email, and support costs down by a third. Can you own this?

Next quarter ends in 20 weeks.

Team facts (a typical month)

• Agents log 6,000 handling hours: phone 3,250, chat 820, and email 1,930. The help desk logs handling time (from opening an item to sending the reply) for every email.
• The support budget is $307,500 a month. Agent time is $246,000 of it; the rest is the phone system, help desk software, training, and management.
• Email volume grew 18% over the past year with the same headcount. The median wait for a first email reply is 26 hours.
• Billing emails go to a pod of 10 agents, and the help desk hands them out in turn (round-robin).
• QA reviews 100 sent email replies a week. About 3 in 100 contain an error: a wrong amount, a wrong date, or a wrong policy.

Email mix (a typical month)

Re-contact is the share of emails where the same customer writes again about the same issue within 7 days.

Rules and tools

• Only staff may grant credits or refunds, each role up to a set limit. No automated system may grant or promise one (company rule).
• A person must acknowledge every complaint within 2 business days (a company rule in this scenario).
• Every cancellation goes to the retention group, which decides whether to make a retention offer; no one else may make one.
• The help desk has macros (fixed reply templates an agent inserts), and a network status page lists known outages by area.
• Option A is the help desk vendor's AI drafting add-on, at $0.047 per drafted reply (fictional price). It can read the customer's account summary (plan, bill lines, payments) and the knowledge base. It cannot read the status page, line tests, the service check for a new address, or past case history.
• The vendor's material says agents using its drafts handle emails in half the time. Nobody has measured that on your emails.
• IT's standard review of a new tool's data terms takes 2 weeks.