How to Create SOPs with AI

Every company has a person who just knows how things work. That is a strength until they take a vacation.

It might be the customer only one salesperson really understands, the process only the office manager can run, the shortcut a senior tech figured out years ago, or the fix for the machine that acts up in the cold. None of it is written down, because the person who knows it is too busy doing it to write a manual.

I managed restaurants before I ran sales for a brewery, and I have spent the last decade building a healthcare staffing company. In every one of those businesses, the knowledge that walked out the door when someone left cost more than anyone budgeted for. This is the sixth area of my workshop Take Back Your Time with AI: build repeatable processes by capturing what your experienced people know.

What does only one person at your company know?

Start by naming it. Ask your leadership team one question: if this person were out for a month, what would stop or go wrong? The answers fall into four buckets: a customer, a process, a shortcut, a fix.

For a contractor, that might be how the lead estimator takes off a mechanical room, or how the senior foreman sets up a job so inspections pass the first time. In a restaurant, it is the closing procedure the best shift lead runs without thinking, or how the kitchen manager places the weekly order. Pick one item from the list. That is your first SOP.

How do you capture knowledge without writing a manual?

Don’t write the manual. Explain the work. Experienced people are usually bad at writing procedures and very good at explaining them. So sit down with them, hit record on your phone, and ask three questions:

Ten minutes of talking can save years of knowledge. Most phones and meeting tools will give you a transcript automatically. If not, AI tools can transcribe the recording.

What prompt turns a transcript into an SOP?

This is the prompt from the workshop. Paste the transcript at the bottom.

Turn the transcript below into a clear SOP for a new employee.

Include:
- Purpose
- Tools and materials
- Step-by-step instructions
- Safety checks
- Common mistakes
- When to stop and ask for help

Use plain language.
Do not invent missing steps.
Mark anything unclear: NEEDS EXPERT REVIEW

TRANSCRIPT:
[PASTE THE TRANSCRIPT HERE]

Two lines carry the weight. “Do not invent missing steps” stops the tool from filling gaps with generic advice that sounds right and is not how your company does it. “Mark anything unclear: NEEDS EXPERT REVIEW” turns every gap into a specific question for your expert, which is far easier for them to answer than a blank page.

The “when to stop and ask for help” section matters more than people expect. New employees do not usually get hurt or cost money because they did not know step four. It happens because nobody told them when to stop.

How does this example work, start to finish?

Why does an expert need to review the SOP?

Because a confident, well-formatted procedure that is wrong is more dangerous than no procedure. AI organizes what was said. It does not know your equipment, your customers or your codes. The expert reviews it before the team uses it, every time, and especially for anything involving safety.

How do SOPs help with training and retention?

Easier to train. Easier to repeat. Less dependent on memory. A new hire with a clear SOP gets productive faster and feels less lost in the first weeks, which is exactly when most people decide whether to stay. I cover that first-week window in How to Recruit and Keep Skilled Trades Workers, and onboarding is where a library of short SOPs pays off most.

There is a quieter benefit too. Your expert stops being interrupted twenty times a day with the same question, and gets recognized for what they know. Asking someone to teach the company how they do it is one of the best ways to tell them their experience matters.

Where should you start this week?

Name the one task that would hurt most if its expert left tomorrow. Book fifteen minutes with that person, record the three questions, run the prompt, and give the draft back to the expert to review. One SOP a week for a quarter gives you a training library of a dozen procedures built from your own people’s experience.

That completes the six areas. To start from the beginning, see How to Use AI to Find New Business, or go straight to the prompt library.