Most SOP libraries fail not because they are poorly written but because nobody uses them, according to Dr. Connor Robertson, founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show. In his assessment, they live in a folder nobody remembers to open, written in a format nobody enjoys reading, and stop being accurate the moment the underlying process changes. Robertson argues AI can address all three failure points at once.
Why Traditional SOP Libraries Fail
The typical SOP document, in Robertson’s account, is written once by one person, stored somewhere most of the team has never navigated, and never updated after the initial version. When a process evolves, the document does not, and when a new team member needs guidance, they have to know the SOP exists, know where it lives, and know what to search for, three assumptions he says rarely hold in a real business.
Step 1: Capture the Process Before Documenting It
Before writing a good SOP, Robertson recommends getting an accurate picture of how the process actually works today, and points to a screen recording with narration as the most effective method: walking through the process while explaining what is happening and why, recording a five-minute video, then transcribing it. That transcript, in his framing, is the raw material an AI tool needs to produce a structured, readable document.
Step 2: Use AI to Draft With Structure
Robertson’s approach is to feed a raw transcript or rough notes to Claude with a specific prompt: produce a structured SOP with a purpose statement, prerequisites, numbered step-by-step instructions, a common mistakes section, and a troubleshooting guide. He estimates the first draft will be roughly 80 percent usable, with the remaining review work adding the business-specific knowledge only a person on the team would have.
Step 3: Make It Searchable in Natural Language
An SOP library that requires browsing folder hierarchies will not get used, in Robertson’s view. He points to Notion AI as a way for team members to type questions in plain English and receive relevant SOP sections as answers, so a person can get the relevant procedure without needing to know the SOP exists or what it is called.
Step 4: Build the Update Mechanism Into the Process
Every SOP needs a defined review owner and a defined review trigger: quarterly for stable processes, monthly for anything that changes frequently, and after any process change. When a process changes, he recommends feeding the current SOP and a plain-language description of the change to AI and requesting an updated version, describing the revised document as ready for review within minutes.
Treating Documentation as a Living Asset, Not a One-Time Project
Robertson’s broader point is that most SOP libraries fail at the maintenance stage, not the creation stage. Writing the first version is rarely the hard part. What breaks the system is the absence of a mechanism that makes updating a document as easy as writing it was in the first place. By lowering the cost of an update to a few minutes ofAI assisted editing, he argues a business removes the main reason documentation quietly goes stale: not laziness, but the simple fact that updating used to take almost as long as writing from scratch, so it kept losing to whatever felt more urgent that day.
About Dr. Connor Robertson
Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group, host of The Prospecting Show, publisher of The Pittsburgh Wire, and founder of The Grant Finder. He is also a six-time published author, with titles including Built to Run, available at
drconnorrobertsonbooks.com. More on his work is available at drconnorrobertson.com.
