The proposal promises an AI strategy, a prototype and a workshop. You can picture the workshop. It is harder to picture what your team will actually do with the prototype on an ordinary working day.
When choosing an AI agency for an SME, follow one piece of work through the proposed project. An incoming invoice is a useful example: it arrives, someone checks it, a question may interrupt it, and eventually accounting receives the approved information.
Ask what the first build will contain
A prototype that reads an amount from a file demonstrates extraction. Your team also needs the original document, a way to correct the amount and somewhere to resolve a missing detail.
Ask the agency to show those steps in its plan. If it promises to automate everything before it has seen an exception, narrow the proposal. A small process that includes correction is more useful than a broad demo that stops at the first awkward invoice.
Your team supplies the part no demo knows
The agency can build the workflow. Your colleagues know why a particular supplier gets reviewed differently or why a seemingly complete invoice still waits. Someone needs time to explain those details and review the result.
Pharen’s Automation Sprint describes a four-week engagement with roughly two to four hours of business-team involvement per week. That is a planning estimate for the defined sprint, not a promise that any process fits into four weeks. Scope and access need to be agreed first.
Make the handover part of the purchase
Before the final meeting, let a colleague handle a rejected suggestion and a stalled case. They should know how to continue, what they can change and whom to contact if the system fails.
Ask what is included after delivery: documentation, support, maintenance and access to the work produced. A prototype that only its developer can operate leaves your team dependent at the moment the project ends.
What the agency can configure in Pharen Hub
For the invoice example, Pharen Hub Lists stores the process fields and status; Workflows defines preparation, questions and approval. Agent steps can support the preparation. The agency work is to connect your intake, configure the checks and agree how approved information reaches accounting. Those implementation tasks belong in the scope alongside the software.
Bring one recurring process and its most difficult exception to scope the first build.
