Turning what you see in the field into a business case

More of our riders speak little or no English than a few years ago. There is no interpreter standing by, and a bus on a tight schedule cannot wait for one. My staff and I have been at the door for those conversations.

I had an idea for a low-cost fix: City-issued phones paired with earbuds that translate a live conversation. Finance asked for a written description of the business need before any purchase.

What I asked

I described what we were seeing and asked for a justification memo.

What came back, and what I sent back

The first draft was correct and lifeless. It had the right legal backbone: federal civil rights law requires agencies like ours to give meaningful access to people with limited English, and the federal guidance uses a four-factor test where cost against resources is one of the factors. A cheap tool that works is exactly what that factor is asking for.

But it read like a compliance filing. I told Claude I wanted it to sound like the people who had stood at that bus door. The next version kept the citations and told the story.

It also caught things I needed to know before I hit send:

Which phone models the translation feature needs.
That one of the languages our riders speak is not supported by the earbud feature, so the request should be framed as phone-based language help with the earbuds as the hands-free part.
That "allowable" and "reimbursable" are not the same word.

It looked for local language data too, and told me plainly when a document it wanted returned an error.

Where it falls short

It will write the safe version unless you ask for your own voice. I edited the draft myself and handed it back for another pass.

Try it

Give it the story first, then ask for the rule that supports it.

Try this yourself

A prompt like the one I used. Paste it into any AI chat and fill in the brackets.

Here is something my staff and I keep running into: [tell the story of what happens].

I want to buy [the fix], and [Finance] needs a written business need first. Write a justification memo that tells the story in our voice, then cite the rule or requirement that supports it. Tell me anything about the product I should check before I send this.

Part of the series 27 ways I actually use AI. Claude drafted this post from the record of our work together.