Field Notes — AI & Automation Mini Cases on René Zander | AI Automation Consultant

Field Note #1: 95% of SAP PII redaction does not need an LLM. The other 5% does.

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The case

Every SAP shop copies production data into dev, QA, and training landscapes. It is how you reproduce bugs on real payloads and train end-users on data that looks like Monday. Every copy is a compliance event — DSGVO Art. 5 requires pseudonymization.

Most DACH enterprises have bought a deterministic masking tool — SAP TDMS, Delphix, Informatica TDM, IBM InfoSphere Optim — and wired it into the copy job. The tool rewrites classified columns: KNA1-NAME1 becomes Mustermann, BSEG-IBAN becomes a fake IBAN that still passes checksum. That covers the ~95% of PII that lives in schema-aware, row-level columns.

Field Note #2: HubSpot lead scoring told us who was engaged. Not who would pay.

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The case

HubSpot native lead scoring is a weighted sum of engagement behaviors: email opened, pricing page visited, demo requested. It tells you who is curious. It does not tell you who will pay.

Sales reps figure that out within a month and stop trusting the score. The actual prioritization moves to a Tuesday-morning meeting where the manager picks ten accounts from instinct, the team dials them, and the other 10,000 contacts sit untouched.

Field Note #3: I let the AI close duplicate issues. Then I turned that off.

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The case

Maintainers with 50+ issues a month have a triage problem. New issues queue up unlabeled, duplicates ship as separate threads, the maintainer’s inbox becomes the to-do list. Backlog rots, contributors stop trusting that anyone is reading.

A triage agent helps if it gets three things right: labels, duplicates, and a first-draft reply — and leaves the close-button click to a human.

FixClaw is what I run on my own repos. It watches issues.opened, classifies labels, runs a hybrid duplicate check, and posts a draft reply or needs-info prompt. Maintainer keeps the final click on close.

Field Note #4: Replacing LeanIX failed. Sitting on top of it worked.

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The case

Mid-market enterprises run transformation portfolios out of Excel. Twenty to fifty initiatives per quarter. The steering committee meets monthly, argues about priority, decides nothing, leaves no audit trail. The CIO of one DACH manufacturer described it as “an expensive way to forget what we agreed to last Tuesday.”

They already had LeanIX. The capability catalog was clean, application lifecycle data was structured, the import-export worked. The piece missing was a decision layer — scoring, prioritization, the reasoning behind a Greenlight or Defer — that wrote back to LeanIX as auditable properties.

Field Note #5: Cross-posting was easy. Closing the performance loop was not.

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The case

A 5-20 person editorial team runs a calendar across a blog, LinkedIn, a newsletter, and two or three syndication destinations. Every piece needs a briefing, a draft, one or two review passes, publishing, and cross-posting with canonical links pointed at the right URL. Then someone has to check reach and engagement next week so the calendar can adjust.

Most teams do this with a Notion database, a shared inbox, Slack threads, and a Google Sheet for metrics. The cross-posting gets automated first. The performance feedback loop never closes. The calendar ships volume; nothing learns from what shipped.