This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Automate a broken process and you get the same mess, faster and more expensively, with a contract attached to it.

The order everyone gets wrong

Somebody decides a function is inefficient, a vendor is chosen, a system is implemented, and eighteen months later people are still doing the work in a spreadsheet next to it. I have bought that system. The reason it failed had nothing to do with the software. Nobody had described the process, so nobody knew where it broke, so what got automated was the version of the process that exists in the head of whoever ran the demo.

What this course actually covers

Five blocks, and the sequence is the point. First, describing a process in BPMN until the break point is visible to everyone in the room, with worked examples end to end. Second, improvement: waste, standardisation, process maturity, the five types of process map, architecture, and the tool set from five whys and 8D through SIPOC and the prioritisation matrix. Third, choosing systems: the classification, selection criteria, negotiating with vendors, and integrating tools so data stops being retyped. Fourth, AI applied to real work — analysis, screening, learning, performance, plus implementation, security and the ethical limits. Fifth, eight lessons on agents: what separates an agent from a chatbot, what they do in each area, and how to build your own with a goal, memory, actions and integrations.

A note on the examples

Twenty-five of the thirty-nine lessons use people-operations examples: applicant systems, learning platforms, onboarding agents, retention forecasting. That is deliberate — this is the back-office function with the densest set of ready-made tools, so it shows the full chain from description to agent better than anything else. The sequence transfers to any process. The specific vendors do not, and given how fast this field moves, treat every tool name as an example rather than a recommendation.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, including choosing and implementing most of its stack, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 39 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: BPMN mapping, the five map types, 5S, five whys, 8D, SIPOC, selection criteria, agent architecture

• A final project: your own working agent for one real task

Where to start

Take the process you most want to automate and try to draw it in ten boxes. If you cannot, you have found the reason the software would not have helped. Enrol now and start today.