Danny McGiffin is a workflow automation and AI consultant based in Herndon, Virginia, serving businesses across Northern Virginia and the Washington, DC area. I help small and midsize businesses find expensive manual work, redesign the process around it, and then decide whether AI, automation, an integration, or a simpler operating change is the right fix.
Most companies do not have an AI problem first. They have a work problem: too many handoffs, too much re-entry, too much delay, and too many capable people doing machine work. Software gets blamed. Headcount gets added. A tool gets purchased. The underlying process stays the same.
What I do
I work at the join between operations and software. I sit with the people who actually do the work, map how a process runs today, put numbers on the cost, and redesign the workflow before anyone picks a tool. Then I can build the automation, agents, or integrations the new process needs, put them into the real workflow, and measure whether they changed the business.
The sequence matters. You cannot automate a process you have not understood. AI will not fix a broken handoff, a missing decision rule, or a system that cannot share the information the next person needs. Those are operating problems. Treat them as operating problems.
The problems this is for
Owners usually come to this work when something concrete is going wrong:
- A quote, intake, or approval sits in a queue while revenue waits.
- The same information is typed into two or three systems because nothing talks to anything else.
- A senior person is the process: if they are out, the work stops.
- Rework is normal. Files come back incomplete. Status lives in email.
- An AI initiative produced demos and meeting summaries, but no change in time, cost, or throughput.
Those are not vague transformation problems. They are expensive, repeatable, and measurable. That is the only kind of work I take on.
How the diagnostic works
I start with an AI Opportunity Sprint: a fixed-price, two-week review of two to four workflows you choose with me. I interview the people who do the work, map how it actually runs, and cost it out — hours, handoffs, rework, and the delay it creates downstream. Nothing is purchased or installed during the review.
The point of the diagnostic is not to produce a slide about AI. It is to find the work that costs too much and put a number on it. If there is no real opportunity, you get the money back and keep the report.
What I am looking for is operational friction that has a business cost:
- Work that is frequent, standardized, and currently done by a person because no one redesigned it.
- Handoffs that drop context, so the next person has to reconstruct the file.
- Judgment that is real, mixed in with gathering, classifying, drafting, and routing that is not.
- Tools that already exist but do not carry the work forward without a human acting as glue.
Redesign the work before you automate it
Once the current process is on paper, the next question is not “which tool?” It is whether this workflow should exist in this shape at all. Some steps should disappear. Some should be done earlier. Some should stop requiring a senior person. Some should stay human because they require judgment, a relationship, or a decision the business is not willing to automate.
Only after that redesign do I look at the mechanism. Sometimes the answer is a clearer process and a better checklist. Sometimes it is an integration between systems you already pay for. Sometimes it is automation of a narrow, well-bounded task. Sometimes AI belongs in the workflow — drafting, classifying, extracting, watching a queue — with a person still responsible for the result.
I will tell you which of those it is. I will not invent an AI project because that is what you asked for on the intake form.
Implementation and measurement
If we decide to build, I implement against the redesigned process, not against a feature list. The work goes into the actual workflow. The team is trained on how to use it. Then we measure the thing we said we would change: time, cost, throughput, error rate, or owner hours returned to the business.
If it cannot be measured, it is not finished. A working demo is not a working system.
Who this is for
This is for an owner or operator of a small or midsize business who can point at a workflow and say it costs too much — in hours, delay, rework, or dependence on one person. You need to be willing to let me talk to the people who do the work and look at how it actually runs. I cannot diagnose a process I am not allowed to see.
It is a good fit if you want the operating system improved, not a tool tour. You are open to the answer being “fix the process” rather than “buy AI.”
Who this is not for
This is not a fit if you want a chatbot on the website, a generic AI workshop, or a vendor to implement a tool you have already chosen without examining the work. It is also not a fit if you need a staff-augmentation team, a same-week software install, or a guarantee that AI is the answer before anyone has looked at the process.
If you are looking for a technology partner first and an operating diagnosis second, I am the wrong person.
Based in Herndon, working across the region
I am based in Herndon, Virginia. I work with businesses across Northern Virginia and the Washington, DC area, including Reston, Chantilly, Fairfax, Tysons, McLean, Vienna, Ashburn, Leesburg, Arlington, Alexandria, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County. Some of the work is on site. Some of it is remote. The location that matters is where the work happens, not where a slide deck is delivered.
I do not have offices in each of those places, and I will not pretend to. Herndon is home base. The region is the working area.