The hardest part of AI automation isn't the technology, it's spotting what to automate. The best candidates are tasks that are repetitive, rules-based and time-consuming. Here's a checklist by department to find yours.
Marketing
- Drafting and repurposing content across channels.
- Scheduling and publishing on a calendar.
- Monitoring competitors and summarising changes.
- Generating first-draft briefs and outlines.
Sales
- Qualifying and enriching inbound leads.
- Drafting personalised follow-ups.
- Logging activity and updating the CRM automatically.
Support
- Answering common questions with an on-brand assistant.
- Triaging and tagging incoming tickets.
- Drafting replies for a human to approve.
Operations
- Extracting data from emails, forms and PDFs.
- Generating quotes, contracts and onboarding docs.
- Compiling recurring reports.
Finance & admin
- Categorising transactions and flagging anomalies.
- Chasing invoices on a schedule.
- Summarising numbers into plain-English updates.
How to prioritise
Score each task on frequency × time taken. The highest scores are your first automations. Then decide build-vs-hire with AI versus a VA, and see real-world setups in AI automation for small businesses.
Turn the checklist into a plan
Send us your top three time-sinks and we'll tell you which are worth automating, and build them as a custom automation. Start here.