Should an AI Implementation Include Our Old Records or Start From Today?

You can automate tomorrow’s work without processing ten years of files. Start by asking what staff need to do with the history. Finding a prior drawing on request needs a different project from filling every field on every past job.

Price the backlog on its own

Suppose a sign maker has a job folder for each customer going back eight years. Staff regularly look up the last paint finish for shops that reorder. They rarely revisit canceled proposals. Start with completed jobs for active accounts and keep the old folders available. Ask the provider for separate estimates for the daily flow, the first batch of old files and manual cleanup. A box of scans with no job numbers can consume more review time than a much larger batch of orderly records.

Choose a clean boundary

• Define the live starting point using a memorable event, such as the first job number issued on Monday.
• Route older records to a staging list that cannot send reminders or other customer messages.
• Reconcile the count of files received, jobs matched and items set aside, then inspect a sample against the originals.

Include a reopened job in the test. It may have an old order date and a new service request, so give staff a way to link the two without treating the customer as a new lead. If the backfill delivers the answers people need, continue with another group. If staff can retrieve the remainder easily from the archive, buy only the current workflow.

For the next step, see how to protect existing records when the same import runs twice.

Put this into practice

Bring a sample of the work and the tools your team uses. We can help define a first project, who reviews it, and how to tell if it works.

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