NorthCoast Veterinary Group — AI Operations Audit
From six clinics, six different intake processes, and a pile of chatbot pitches to a written, prioritised AI roadmap in one week.
Impact
What changed.
Real numbers, not vibes
1,200+ saveable hours per year identified across the 22 mapped workflows — measured against actual clinic-lead and vet-tech timesheets, not vendor brochures.
Six chatbot pitches, killed
The founder stopped taking generic "AI receptionist" meetings. Every future vendor conversation now starts with "does this map to one of the four workflows in our audit?" — saving hours of evaluation time per month.
From audit to build in 90 days
Phase 1 — the intake triage agent — kicked off 90 days post-audit with the audit fee credited in full. The written report became the implementation brief, with zero re-discovery required.
The challenge
Before
NorthCoast Veterinary Group was running six clinics, each with its own version of patient intake, scheduling, and lab-result handling. There was no shared definition of "the workflow" — and no honest way to evaluate where AI would actually pay back. The founder was getting pitched a new chatbot or "AI receptionist" almost every week and had no framework to compare them. Leadership wanted a vendor-neutral read on where to invest first, where to leave things alone, and which pitches to stop taking meetings about.
- Six clinics each running their own intake, scheduling, and lab-result process
- No baseline measure of hours lost to repetitive admin per clinic
- Founder being pitched 6+ different chatbot vendors with no way to evaluate them
- Lab results manually triaged by vet techs across all locations
- No shared SOPs — every clinic lead had their own workarounds
- Multiple half-started SaaS trials abandoned because nobody scoped the workflow first
- No prioritisation framework for AI spend — pure gut feel
- No internal capacity to write a real implementation brief
The solution
What we built
We ran our 1-week paid AI Operations Audit. Over five days we interviewed three clinic leads and two frontline vet techs, sat through real intake calls, and shadowed a lab-result triage cycle. We mapped 22 recurring workflows across the group and scored each on three axes — hours saved per year, automation complexity, and risk if the agent gets it wrong. The deliverable was a written report (PDF + Notion) with four prioritised recommendations: an intake triage agent ranked #1, lab-result classification ranked #2, plus two smaller wins for reminders and pre-visit forms. We also included an honest no-go list — three workflows we explicitly recommended against automating. Ninety days later they came back and we built recommendation #1 together. The audit fee was credited toward the build.
Core workflow connections
How the system flows.
- Discovery interviews3 clinic leads + 2 vet techs across all locations
- Workflow mapping22 recurring manual processes documented end-to-end
- Leverage scoringhours/year saved × automation complexity × risk-if-wrong
- Vendor pitch triageevaluated 6 active chatbot pitches against real workflow data
- Priority shortlisttop 4 automations scoped with fixed-budget envelopes
- No-go list3 workflows explicitly flagged as wrong fit for AI
- Written reportPDF + Notion deliverable, owned by the client
- Implementation handoveraudit fee credited when Phase 1 build kicked off 90 days later
Process
How we built it.
Discovery interviews → 3 clinic leads + 2 vet techs across all locations
Workflow mapping → 22 recurring manual processes documented end-to-end
Leverage scoring → hours/year saved × automation complexity × risk-if-wrong
Vendor pitch triage → evaluated 6 active chatbot pitches against real workflow data
Priority shortlist → top 4 automations scoped with fixed-budget envelopes
No-go list → 3 workflows explicitly flagged as wrong fit for AI
Written report → PDF + Notion deliverable, owned by the client
Implementation handover → audit fee credited when Phase 1 build kicked off 90 days later
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Getting pitched AI tools you can't evaluate?
Our 1-week AI Operations Audit gives you a written, vendor-neutral read on where AI actually pays back in your business — and where it doesn't.
No retainer lock-in · Month-to-month · Full transparency
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