# Q&A with Vista's William Floyd on AI Workflows > William Floyd led a workshop at the Select Oklahoma Conference, giving economic developers a practical guide to AI guardrails and prompting. *Canonical page: https://www.vistasiteselection.com/blog/vista-william-floyd-on-ai-workflows/* --- *By Vista Site Selection · August 20, 2026 · 2 min read* William Floyd, Vista Site Selection’s senior vice president of strategy & communications, recently had the opportunity to lead a workshop at the Select Oklahoma Conference on Economic Development.  During the workshop, titled “AI and The Economic Developer,” William gave industry professionals an overview of practical guardrails, prompting and creative workflows. He made one thing clear to his audience, however: There is no universal “right” answer.  Technology helps but its user must utilize their own knowledge and experience to guide that technology to an ideal solution.  Mastering AI is much like the site selection projects that Vista undertakes; there are unique challenges to each and important contexts to consider.  Fortunately, William and the Vista team have spent years adapting AI to assist in these projects, building decades of experience in site selection. We sat down with Will to discuss how beginners to AI can utilize the technology for their professional needs. ##### **_You recently spoke at the Select Oklahoma Conference on Economic Development. How was that?_** It was great! I had the opportunity to lead an AI workshop and breakout session, kind of give people a taste of what Vista has been doing for a while now. The goal was not to convince anyone that AI has all the answers. It was to show what becomes possible when you learn how to ask better questions, structure your thoughts, choose the right tools and stay curious enough to experiment. That’s a mindset that Vista has brought to AI, and really site selection tech in general, and it’s paid off. I was thrilled when many attendees came back for my second session to keep building on what they had been working on when we stopped the day before. ##### **_You like to discuss that the advantage doesn't happen just because you have AI but because of workflows put in place to use AI. Could you discuss that?_** Workflows essentially means delving deeper into your thought process before you prompt. There are a million ways to prompt. A prompt without a workflow is a wish. The AI may create something for you but there's no meat. There's no potatoes. It's not baked. Workflows are what make the difference in whether your content hits the mark or not.  And it requires more thinking out loud from the front, right? But spending time on workflows leads to better results and ultimately saves you time fixing bad results.  !["AI and The Economic Developer" presentation at Select Oklahoma Conference on Economic Development](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/blog/images/SOCOED2026-MON_MD_031.webp "'AI and The Economic Developer' presentation at Select Oklahoma Conference on Economic Development") ##### **_Could you explain your workflow when approaching a project?_** I use a process called “BRIEF + Verify.” BRIEF is an acronym. It stands for background, role, intent, expectations and format. Think about it in terms of asking an AI tool for a joke. For the background, you could explain why you need a joke. What's the purpose of this joke? Are you going to go on stand-up? Or do you just need a funny opening one-liner because you're going on a date later? Give it some background. The role. Who do you want to tell the joke? Dana Carvey? Dave Chappelle? Intention and expectation are similar; define what success looks like for you. And then the format, how do you want that? A knock-knock joke? A meme? And then of course, at the end, verify. AI wasn't going to make it without your prompt. So at the end of the day, you're responsible for whatever AI makes, because AI is not going to make anything without your input. ##### **_Vista is well known for_** [**_creating innovative tools for its site selection work_**](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/tools/) **_and compliance tracking. Are you building similar tools with AI to use for your own purposes?_** Yeah.  Basically I, or anybody who picks up this methodology, you are Danny Ocean from _Ocean’s Eleven_. He’s not the contortionist. He’s not the safecracker. He's basically just the guy that knows how to assemble a team, right? And so when you're assembling a team, you need to know what you need and how you need it.  That’s where your expertise and experience is essential. Roles I’ve created include, one, for research; I want you to go out and I want you to take on this role and I want you to find all this information and bring all this stuff back to me.  Now I want you to take on the role as “relay”; I want you to relay all this messaging to me so that I get the full synapses breakdown. Now I need you to act as “signal,” and I want you to take my messaging that I've been working on and be able to communicate effectively to a community. At a higher level, we’re using AI for deep research, coding, data analysis and building proprietary tools that let us do things we previously needed multiple platforms or datasets to accomplish.  ![William Floyd, Vista Site Selection's senior vice president of strategy and communications](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/blog/images/SOCOED2026-MON_MD_012.webp "William Floyd, Vista Site Selection's senior vice president of strategy and communications") ##### **_Do any of the previous tools that Vista has created use AI to interact with the data you have?_** Yes, [we have a tool called The System](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/tools/the-system/). You can basically talk to it and interface what you want, and that'll interface with our AI and our data. It listens to what you're saying, pulls the data that you need into a map and makes you able to visualize stuff that you can now dictate or talk to in a map.  It’s got eight AI-powered site intelligence tools showing nearly 1,500 demographic variables and about 3 million H3 hex cells across all of the United States. ##### **_Has this opened up time for you to pursue more valuable tasks?_** Yeah, absolutely.  It's kind of an ever-evolving state and we try to make sure that we're on the front line with it. Before AI, there was so much time spent maintaining data. It might take a week to really clean up, verify, make it usable, tie it to a geographic information system so that you can visualize it. Certain parts of that process that could eat up days or even weeks can now happen in minutes. Now we can lace these things together in ways that we never dreamed possible, or to weave all these things together into one place in the system where we can infer different things that we were never able to do before. We need to spend time figuring how to lace those things together. The AI can do it but it won’t do it unless we make the prompt. Now we can spend more time thinking about the data and not just organizing it. And of course you have to verify relentlessly. You have to fact check and you still have to know how to do it from a human level to validate it. It's through a meticulous method of doing a lot of that that we kind of come to the new age stuff that we're doing. That’s the exciting part to me. We’ve gotten to a point where we can spend less time wrestling with the mechanics and more time asking better questions of the data. I’m excited to see what we’re able to build next. Or at least speak about AI at more conferences! **_If you’re interested in learning more about Vista Site Selection’s tech and data offerings and how we use them to find the ideal site for your project,_** [**_contact Vista today_**](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/contact/)**_._** ## How Vista can help - [Site Selection Consulting](https://www.vistasiteselection.com/services/site-selection-consulting/): Where you locate decides more than any other decision you'll make this decade. --- More insights: https://www.vistasiteselection.com/blog/ --- **Vista Site Selection, LLC**, data-driven site selection, incentives, and economic impact advisory. Majority-owned by Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP. 52 East Gay Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215 · Info@vistasiteselection.com · https://www.vistasiteselection.com