Individual interviews are valuable for understanding AI opportunities, but they only give you part of the picture. You get depth from one-on-one conversations, but you need breadth to find truly transformative opportunities.
The best insights often come from expanding beyond those initial conversations—getting teams together, creating space for uncomfortable truths, and letting people see their work through others' eyes.
1. Facilitated Cross-Functional Workshops
Bring together employees from different departments. The magic happens when marketing explains their process to operations, or when finance walks through their month-end close with IT watching.
Suddenly, everyone sees the inefficiencies. The workarounds that seemed normal become obviously absurd when you have to explain them to someone outside your bubble.
These sessions don't need to be formal. A two-hour working session with the right people in the room can surface more opportunities than weeks of individual interviews.
2. Anonymous Feedback Channels
Not everyone feels comfortable sharing face-to-face. Some inefficiencies are politically sensitive—they might implicate a manager's decisions or a vendor relationship that someone championed.
Digital suggestion boxes, anonymous surveys, or even simple forms can surface insights that would never come up in a meeting. The key is making it genuinely anonymous and acting on what you learn.
3. Role-Specific Pain Point Mapping
A warehouse manager's bottlenecks look nothing like a data analyst's. A customer success rep faces different friction than a software engineer.
Tailor your discovery approach to each role's unique challenges. Generic questions get generic answers. Specific questions about specific workflows reveal specific opportunities.
4. Cross-Functional Collaboration Sessions
The best AI solutions often span departments. A customer inquiry that starts in support, moves to billing, escalates to operations, and eventually reaches engineering—that journey is invisible to anyone sitting in just one of those departments.
Getting IT, operations, and business units in the same room reveals these interconnected opportunities. You'll find that solving one team's problem often requires understanding three other teams' workflows.
5. AI Potential Demonstrations
Most people don't know what's possible. They're stuck thinking about AI in terms of what they've read in headlines or seen in demos that don't apply to their work.
Show small-scale prototypes or case studies from similar roles or industries. When people see what's actually possible, they think differently about their own challenges. "Oh, if it can do that, then maybe it could help with..." is exactly the response you want.
The Multiplier Effect
When you combine individual interviews with team engagement, insights compound. That manual process one person mentioned? Three others might depend on its output. The data entry that seems like a minor annoyance? It's actually blocking a downstream process that affects customer experience.
These connections only become visible when you create space for people to share across their usual boundaries. The real opportunities aren't in isolated tasks—they're in the workflows that span teams, the handoffs that create friction, and the workarounds that everyone just accepts as normal.
The goal isn't to find every possible AI application. It's to find the ones that matter—the opportunities where AI can create genuine, measurable impact across the organization.