The Great Process Reset¶
What if AI could free us from endless paperwork? Through Tukki's legal-tech journey, learn how proper digital foundations can transform administrative tedium into meaningful work.
We've all been there. Staring at yet another form, clicking through endless screens, or jumping through bureaucratic hoops that seem to exist purely for the sake of existing. You know it's pointless. I know it's pointless. Even the person who designed it probably knows it's pointless. Yet we play by these arbitrary rules, because that's just how things are done.
But what if they didn't have to be? What if the rise of AI could finally break this cycle of bureaucratic madness? While we might not be able to eliminate bureaucracy entirely (let's be realistic), we now have the power to transform these often senseless processes into something more bearable – maybe even efficient.
The promise isn't just about automating paperwork. It's about fundamentally rethinking how we build technology, making it work for people rather than against them.
Freeing professionals from low-value chores¶
Traditionally, navigating bureaucracy has relied on specialists like lawyers who master tax codes, immigration consultants who understand visa requirements, and insurance experts who decode policies. Their expertise is invaluable, but a significant portion of their work often involves navigating repetitive and administratively heavy processes.
AI is reshaping this landscape, not by sidelining these professionals, but by freeing them from routine tasks through automation and digitalization. By streamlining processes and making information more accessible, AI allows experts to focus on value-added, interesting tasks rather than spending their time on mundane admin work. This shift enables them to direct their skills toward crafting complex strategies and interpreting nuanced scenarios.
Digital Foundation¶
Here's the catch, though: AI isn't magic. It can't make sense of scattered paper files, inconsistent spreadsheets, or processes that exist only in your team members' heads. The irony is striking – while we debate how close we are to AGI, many of us still queue at government offices, clutching 500-page paper forms for procedures that seem to last an eternity.
This means taking a hard look at your processes and data. Are your documents digitized and properly structured, or are they gathering dust in filing cabinets? Can your systems communicate seamlessly, or are they operating in isolation? Have you standardized your workflows, or is each department running its own show? These aren't mere IT checkboxes – these are enablers for impactful AI applications: the better the foundations on which you'll deploy AI, the more impact it can achieve. A poor foundation will constrain AI projects to live within silos, just as many teams do operate nowadays in large organizations.
This need for strong foundations is exactly what Tukki embraced when building their legal-tech platform. Focused on transforming the US immigration experience, Tukki demonstrates how starting with the basics - organizing workflows and digitizing processes - can lay the groundwork for effective AI implementation.
A real life example: Tukki¶
Tukki.ai is a legal-tech startup that's bringing a premium US immigration experience to all by uniting tech and lawyers under the same roof. If you want to move to or work in the US, you can hire Tukki to access their platform which powers their top notch paralegal team and an immigration attorney—designated to you based on your unique case. They charge the same as a traditional law firm that handles everything manually, but you get to see every step, advance, and task at a glance. No more losing files in emails, chasing lawyers, or endless back-and-forth on Word docs.
When Ramiro Roballos and Saveliy Vasilev, the founders of Tukki, launched the company, the temptation was to tinker with AI from day 1—everyone was trying to surf the AI wave. However, they knew that without proper foundations, they'll get only so far. From their former consulting careers, Ramiro and Saveliy gained insights into applying AI in organizations—big and small.
A key learning was: If you're aiming for a large and sustainable impact with AI, you better get the technological basics right first. Only with a sound foundation can you feed the models and consume their outputs effectively. Getting the basics right means capturing most of the data flows in your digital medium of choice, as long as it is easily consumable for a data science team.
Tukki's platform showing how digital tasks are handled
Consider the extremes of the technologically empowered spectrum: If your business runs on exchanging powerpoints and excel sheets via emails, then it'll be tough to improve these processes. If, at the other extreme, you have a platform that captures all your key workflows and all the data lives inside this platform, then extracting value from the historical data is just around the corner for your company. Tukki’s tech strategy was simple: build software that would a) organize everyone's work, and b) progressively move processes over to be handled in their platform. They call processes that still happen outside of their tech "off platform."
This approach has already paid dividends:
- The organization of legal work turned out to be a large undertaking in itself, efficiencies gained simply by organizing and documenting everything in one place made the processes way better straight off the bat—without AI!
- As soon as they make a release that allows a process to be handled on-platform, the users begin to generate useful data. This allowed Tukki’s team to introduce some AI in a very natural way. In fact, they recently updated some of these models by taking a larger dataset into account, which further enhanced the efficiencies.
Wrapping up¶
As Tukki's story shows us, AI is not a magic wand that solves al our problems. It is an accelerator, and the key to using it wisely is building the right foundation first. Before you can unlock AI's potential, your processes need to be organized and digital. It's straightforward: build your digital foundation, and AI becomes the accelerator that transforms bureaucratic paperwork into high-value work. No shortcuts – just strategic groundwork to become truly LLM native.