Why is your AI output all garbage? Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are the source code for the AI ​​era.

A while ago, our team developed several AI agents.

Not the kind of toy that's shown in a demo to impress people, but the kind that's thrown into the real business process and involves real, hands-on work every day.

And guess what happened?

After watching the demo, almost all of my business friends gathered around and whispered, "What kind of big model are you using? How is it so smart?"

I laugh every time.

Then I told them, "Brothers, the important thing isn't the model."

It's a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP).

That sounds a bit harsh, but sometimes I feel that what he said is indeed the truth.

Leverage, not the brain

During this period, we tried Claude, GPT-5, DeepSeek, and Qianwen. To be honest, for the same task, the results were drastically different depending on what we fed in.

The same sentence: Help me reply to a client.

Some people feed the message, "You are a professional customer service representative, please reply to customers politely," but what comes out is a bunch of standard, correct, but completely useless nonsense.

Someone fed him the sales logic that his top sales brother had accumulated over three years of trial and error: how to find pain points, how to handle objections, and when to close the deal. The output would leave you stunned, because it didn't sound like a machine talking.

What's the difference?

It's not in the brain, it's in the system that's been fed to us.

I've always had this feeling that too many people are using AI like a brain.

I felt that as long as the model was powerful enough, I could just throw in a vague instruction and it would do the job perfectly for me.

That's not the case.

The essence of AI is not the brain, but leverage.

The only function of a lever is to amplify.

If you give it an extremely precise and repeatedly validated high-win-rate strategy, it can help you increase your production capacity by a thousand or ten thousand times.

But if you feed it a bunch of messy, even illogical, instructions, it will amplify the mess itself.

There's an old saying in the programmer community: "Garbage in, garbage out."

Garbage in, garbage out.

In the AI ​​era, I think we need to update our understanding.

SOPs are no longer just documents.

SOP is the company's source code.

I went over that sentence in my mind several times, and the more I thought about it, the more apt it seemed.

Think about it: what is code? It's a set of precisely described, executable logic that produces what you take in.

If you mistype a single character, the program crashes, or gives you a completely unexpected result.

In the eyes of AI, this is what a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is.

It doesn't care how beautifully you write or how thoughtfully you create your PPT; it only cares about the instructions you give, whether they actually work, and whether they truly lead to victory.

The SOP you wrote might just be a job description.

But in many companies, what I've seen so-called SOPs are, to put it bluntly, just job descriptions.

What I write is: every morning at 9 o'clock, I open the backend and reply to customer messages.

This kind of thing is invalid code to AI.

It's invalid because it only describes the action, not the logic of winning.

It tells you when to start work and what tasks to do, but it doesn't tell you how to respond when a customer yells at you, which way to push the customer when they say they'll think about it, or what words to use to bring the customer back when they're about to leave.

These are the logics to winning.

These logics are mostly hidden in the minds of veteran employees, in the muscle memory of those top sales performers and veteran operations staff, and have never been written down.

At this point, I have to say something on behalf of many companies.

I completely understand why SOPs are eventually written as job descriptions.

Because truly useful SOPs are just too damn hard to write.

You have to break down the tricks that someone has worked on for five years and tried and failed ten thousand times into extremely fine steps, explaining in what context, what words to use, and what purpose to achieve for each step.

This requires someone who is willing to share their most valuable skills, bit by bit, and turn them into words.

This job is slow, tiring, and offends people, and there are no immediate benefits.

Therefore, most companies have chosen the simplest solution: write a job description to get by, as long as people can understand it.

However, this solution no longer holds true in the AI ​​era.

A true Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) must be business-oriented.

A true Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) must be business-oriented.

Let me give you a specific example.

How to use AI for sales.

Many people's first reaction is to teach AI to be more polite, more professional, and to speak in a friendly tone.

wrong.

This is no different from teaching a newcomer to say "hello" and "welcome." They can remember the script, but they can't remember when to reveal their true intentions.

What you should really feed to AI is the sales logic that your company's top salesperson has developed, even if it took ten thousand trials and errors.

It's the game behind the sales pitch, the path to uncovering pain points, and the ability to anticipate what a customer is really thinking when they say those words.

Break down this entire high ROI mindset into extremely fine-grained SOPs and then feed them to AI.

At this point, the AI ​​possessed the soul of that top salesperson.

Only it can truly replace that top salesperson who earns 30,000 yuan a month and you might not even be able to retain them, and process the massive amount of leads that you simply can't handle.

This is the source code.

Sometimes when I stare at the few agents we run, I feel a little disoriented.

Because the work it does is something that an ordinary intern can't compare to. It keeps an eye on hundreds of leads at the same time, and it follows the logic of a top salesperson for each one. It doesn't get emotional, it doesn't get tired, and it doesn't slack off just because it has met its monthly sales target.

All its capabilities come from the written SOP.

Conversely, if you don't have this source code.

You can just tell the AI, "Write some copy , reply to the client."

Its output is nothing more than industrial waste piled up with pretty nonsense.

It looks very efficient, producing a bunch of results in a flash, but in reality, it's just mass-producing invalid interactions.

The customer received that polite but empty reply and knew perfectly well that it was just a machine giving them a perfunctory response.

You think you're saving manpower, but actually you're losing customers faster than ever before.

The more powerful the AI, the higher the requirements for Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

And there's something particularly counterintuitive about this.

The more powerful the AI, the higher the requirements for the boss and core team's SOP writing ability.

It's not about the lower the price.

Many people think that with the advancement of AI, they can easily win by using it casually.

Quite the opposite.

The amplification effect of leverage is symmetrical.

The more powerful the model, the greater the amplification of the chaos in your chaotic instruction set.

In the past, we could rely on the experience and understanding of veteran employees to plug the loopholes in the process. Although the company was in dire need of repairs, it could at least keep running.

If you want to leverage AI, you must first make the tacit knowledge in your mind and that of business experts explicit, turning it into compileable code.

I've fallen into this trap myself.

When we first started working on the Agent, we were excited and thought we could entrust it with everything. But the first version that came out was a disaster.

It's not that the model is bad, it's that we haven't figured out what logic we want it to follow.

The logic exists in our minds, but without putting it into a word-by-word, step-by-step SOP, AI can only stumble around in the dark.

Later, we spent several weeks breaking down and rewriting the strategies for several core businesses one by one before we gradually got them running smoothly.

Honestly, this process is more tiring than hiring people directly.

But once you get into a rhythm, that burst of speed is truly exhilarating.

Being as dull as I am, I thought everything would be fine once I got to the model, but reality rubbed me in the dirt for several weeks.

Electricity in 1880, and AI today.

This reminds me of a very old story.

In the 1880s, electricity began to become widespread in the United States, and many factory owners spent a lot of money to buy generators and electric motors and install them in their factories.

They thought that once I was powered on, my efficiency would definitely take off.

As a result, many people found that production efficiency did not improve significantly.

Because they simply replaced the original steam engine with an electric motor, but the layout, production lines, and management methods of the entire factory remained unchanged.

The electricity comes in, it's just a change of power source, the old process remains unchanged.

Those who truly benefited from the electricity boom were the first to figure out what factories should look like after electricity came in.

They redesigned the factory, arranging the machines around electricity instead of making electricity accommodate the old layout left by the steam engine.

The same applies to AI.

This current stage is actually quite similar to 1880.

Many people rushed in, bought the most expensive models, and installed the most dazzling agents, but the underlying business processes and the standard operating procedures were still the same as they were back in the early days of the makeshift team.

Electricity has been supplied, but the layout remains unchanged.

So what you see is many companies using the most advanced AI to do the most primitive work, producing a bunch of beautiful industrial waste.

The battle of heads has come down to a battle of logic.

And I think the most powerful aspect of this wave of AI technology is this.

It has forcefully shifted business competition from a contest of manpower to a contest of logic.

In the past, you could rely on having a large workforce, a few veterans to keep things afloat, and the boss to put out fires every day. Even though the company was chaotic, its size meant it could still survive.

Not anymore.

All the efficiency achieved through human effort is worthless in the face of computing power.

Ultimately, the benefits of technological advancements will come down to the organization's fundamental skills.

When you're still treating SOPs as just a document to get by.

Those competitors who treat SOPs as source code to write, compile, and iterate repeatedly have already begun to use computing power to outcompete human resources.

Sometimes I feel that many people have misjudged the future.

People are always worried that AI will replace so-and-so.

I don't think so.

In the future, it won't be AI that eliminates a certain group of people.

Instead, the organization that had always operated on ambiguity, tacit understanding, and a makeshift management style suddenly exposed itself in the face of precise algorithms.

It usually relies on people to cover it up, so the problem is concealed.

Once AI, the ruthless executor, is replaced, the logic that was never clearly written down becomes completely exposed.

You think you have a set procedure.

Actually, all you have are a few exceptionally capable long-term employees.

The more I think about those words, the colder I feel.

Going back to the original question

Let's go back to the original question.

A friend asked me what kind of large model we used.

Now I would ask him the same question.

What are you feeding it?

Because the models will become more and more numerous, cheaper and cheaper, and more and more like water and electricity, becoming infrastructure.

But the high-win-rate logic written into the SOP, the ability to compile the soul of top sales performers into code, will always be scarce.

That's the real moat.

It's not a model.

It's the source code in your head.

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