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The Process of Elimination

S1. Episode: 1
Your SOP Is Broken and AI Is About to Prove It

In this first episode of Process of Elimination (POE), Ryan Edwards, Co-founder of Camino5, and Justin L. Brown unpack the real reason AI rollouts fail inside teams—and what needs to change before you even think about deploying another tool. With Ryan’s strategic depth and Justin’s sharp curiosity, the conversation reveals how organizations can turn AI from chaos into clarity.

Your SOP Is Broken and AI Is About to Prove It

Inside this episode:

-Why AI won’t fix a broken workflow

-The danger of “Shadow AI” inside organizations

-The 5 Layers of AI Fluency every team needs

-How to audit your SOPs and workflows for the future

AI doesn’t break your system—it reveals where it was already broken.

If you're leading a team through the realities of AI adoption, this episode shows you where the cracks are—and how to lead the shift with clarity.

Episode Glossary

  • A repeatable process that is performed the same way consistently because it is known to be effective.

  • The use of AI tools by individuals within an organization outside of established, structured workflows, teams, or SOPs.

  • The disparity created when individual users of shadow AI become highly efficient in their personal tasks, but the lack of standardized workflows prevents this efficiency from scaling across teams or the entire organization.

  • The reduction in accuracy or completeness of information that can occur when AI is used to summarize, distill, or process data without adequate human oversight or understanding of the original context.

Episode FAQ

  • An SOP, or Standard Operating Procedure, is essentially a repeatable process or set of steps that you follow because it has been determined to be the most effective way to achieve a task. It's important in the context of AI implementation because AI tools are often integrated into existing workflows and processes. If the underlying SOP is broken or inefficient, simply adding AI to it will likely expose those flaws rather than fix them. AI works best when integrated into well-defined and functional processes.

  • Current AI rollouts often fail because organizations are treating AI as a "silver bullet" to fix existing problems without addressing the underlying issues in their Standard Operating Procedures and workflows. People are "duct-taping LLMs into workflows they do not trust." This lack of process and guidance on how to properly use AI within the organizational structure leads to issues like degraded information, inconsistent results, and a lack of scalability and repeatability.

  • Shadow AI refers to individuals within an organization using AI tools independently, outside of established team workflows, SOPs, or organizational guidance. This is often done to increase personal efficiency in response to increased demands. However, it's a concern because it creates inconsistency in how tasks are performed, leads to different outcomes on shared projects due to varied prompting and data inputs, and creates an "efficiency gap" where individual productivity increases but team or organizational scalability and repeatability suffer.

  • AI usage can lead to degraded information and project failures, especially in iterative processes involving multiple AI touches. If information is summarized or distilled by AI multiple times without human oversight, important details, nuances, or specific asks can be lost or subtly altered. This degraded information can lead to missed deadlines, incorrect deliverables, and projects that do not meet stakeholder expectations, as the final output may be significantly different from the initial request.

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Process Of Elimination Episodes

  • S1E1: Your SOP Is Broken and AI Is About to Prove It

    In this first episode of Process of Elimination (POE), Ryan Edwards, Co-founder of Camino5, and Justin L. Brown unpack the real reason AI rollouts fail inside teams

    ▶ Watch Ep. 1

  • S1E2: Why AI Should Make You Dangerous

    Unpack why the true advantage of AI isn’t speed, but what you do with the time and insights it creates.

    ▶ Watch Ep. 2

  • S1E3 Why Smart Teams Audit During, Not After #AI

    The most overlooked AI move is the audit. Not flowcharts or jargon. Just simple check-ins that sharpen your system.

    ▶ Watch Ep. 3

  • S1E4 How to Preserve Brand Voice While Scaling with AI

    The hidden risk in AI content workflows? Brand voice drift. It starts small, but over time your message can lose its edge and feel replaceable.

    ▶ Watch Ep. 4

  • S1E5 Are You Automating the Wrong Things?

    Automation can save you time — but only if your system actually works. Otherwise, you’re scaling chaos.

    ▶ Watch Ep. 5