Identifying Automation Opportunities in Your Work

Before building anything, identify which tasks in your workflow are worth automating. Not everything should be automated — and building the wrong thing is worse than building nothing.

The Automation Qualification Criteria

A task is worth automating with AI when it meets most of these criteria:

• Repetitive: You do it multiple times per week in roughly the same way
• Rule-based enough: The steps are consistent, even if the content varies
• Data-driven: Information moves from one place to another as part of the task
• Time-consuming relative to complexity: It takes meaningful time but does not require unique human judgment
• AI-suitable: The task benefits from text processing, classification, summarisation, or generation

The Time Audit Technique

• Spend one week logging every repetitive task you do:
• What triggered it?
• What steps did you take?
• How long did it take?
• How often does it happen?
• What tools were involved?

At the end of the week, rank your tasks by: (frequency x time per occurrence). The top of this list is where automation has the most impact.

High-Value Automation Categories

• Email processing
• Categorising and routing inbound emails
• Drafting replies to common inquiry types
• Extracting action items from email threads
• Summarising long email chains

• Content operations
• Publishing approved content to multiple platforms
• Generating first drafts from briefs submitted in a form
• Repurposing content from one format to another

• Research and monitoring
• Summarising new articles in your RSS feeds
• Monitoring competitor websites for changes
• Aggregating market news into a daily digest

• Data processing
• Extracting structured data from unstructured documents
• Classifying customer feedback by category and sentiment
• Populating CRM records from email or form data

• Notifications and reporting
• Weekly performance digests to stakeholders
• Alerts when metrics cross thresholds
• Meeting summaries delivered to relevant people

The "So What?" Test

Before building a workflow, ask: even if this runs perfectly, what is the concrete impact?

• Good answers:
• "It saves 2 hours a week of manual data entry"
• "It means customer inquiries get an initial response within 5 minutes instead of 2 hours"
• "It ensures nothing falls through the cracks in our review process"

Build workflows with concrete, measurable impact first.