The seven-day question

At HSBC I kept hearing the same sentence from analysts: I know what I would do, I just cannot get the pack out in time. The work took seven days. Not because anyone was slow — because the path from question to answer ran through six countries and about nine handoffs.

So we stopped trying to make the pack faster and started asking which parts of the pack actually needed a human. Repetitive pulls, first-draft narratives, consistency checks — those moved to agentic workflows on the enterprise GenAI platform. Judgement calls stayed with people.

The cycle went from seven days to fifteen minutes and annual cost came down about 40%. But the number I cared about was different: analysts started asking better questions, because the cost of asking had collapsed.

The hard part was not the technology. It was change management across six countries — showing up, training people, and being honest that some of what they had been doing would not come back. Adoption only happened once the teams believed the tool was theirs, not something imposed on them.

If you run a team where the answer takes a week, the question worth asking is whether that is a research problem or a routing problem. Most weeks, it is routing.