Anybody who's worked in an office knows that people that ask for things don't give sufficient, consistent, or logical instructions, because otherwise they would be programmers. Also, they just don't know what they want, at least at first. In some places, things are regimented so requests are made formally and kicked back if they are inadequate. But ordinarily people who work in the same office engage in dialogue, and knowing what questions to ask is orders of magnitude harder than processing the surface meaning of the original instructions. Even for a bright person with a lifetime of experience, I don't think it's unreasonable to take a few months to grasp how a business works, and think of how much data that would represent for an AI.