# The Business-to-AI Translation Matrix

## Purpose

This playbook helps Forward Deployed Engineers translate vague business requests into:

- scoped AI system designs
- measurable PoC success criteria
- deterministic guardrails
- realistic phase-one boundaries

## The translation spine

1. Deconstruct the workflow
2. Decide AI vs deterministic logic
3. Map KPI to SLO

## Day-one client discovery questions

1. Can I watch 3 real workflows before we discuss architecture?
2. Where is the system of record today?
3. What is the cost of a wrong answer?
4. What latency budget is real?
5. Which users require strict permission isolation?
6. What deployment boundary is hard: cloud, VPC, or air-gap?
7. Who owns Day-2 operations?
8. What single metric decides whether this PoC was worth it?
9. Which legacy systems require writes?
10. What is explicitly out of scope for phase one?

## Example matrix

### Support automation

- Business request: "Automate 80% of support tickets."
- Root cause: operators spend time switching systems, not writing.
- Translation: intent classification + SOP retrieval + deterministic tool calling
- Guardrails: human approval for refunds / discounts, confidence threshold for escalation

### Contract extraction

- Business request: "Extract data from years of contracts and invoices."
- Root cause: documents are multimodal and inconsistent
- Translation: OCR/vision parsing + typed extraction + validation
- Guardrails: regex and numeric checks on critical fields

### Internal knowledge assistant

- Business request: "Give employees ChatGPT over internal docs."
- Root cause: permissions and document versions conflict
- Translation: ACL-aware hybrid retrieval + version tagging
- Guardrails: citations required; abstain when context is weak

### Workflow automation

- Business request: "Automate the full approval flow."
- Root cause: the workflow includes compliance checkpoints and irreversible writes
- Translation: state-machine orchestration with targeted LLM nodes
- Guardrails: dead-stop gates before regulated actions

## KPI to SLO conversion

- "It cannot make reckless promises." -> faithfulness checks, schema validation, guardrail pass rate
- "Users will not wait." -> TTFT and end-to-end latency budgets
- "The ROI must work." -> token budgets, cost ceilings, cache strategy

## PoC success criteria outline

- Objective
- Golden scenario set
- Quality threshold
- Latency target
- Automation-rate target
- Safety constraints
- In-scope systems
- Out-of-scope systems
- Day-2 owner

## Companion pages

- https://fdehub.dev/tools/readiness
- https://fdehub.dev/learn/fde-skills-matrix
- https://fdehub.dev/interviews/fde-case-study-decomp
- https://fdehub.dev/learn/how-to-become-a-forward-deployed-engineer