Guide
What should a small business automate first?
AiThrive Solutions · Updated
The short answer
Start with work that happens often, follows the same steps every time and takes your team's time without needing their judgement. Those tasks are the safest to automate, the quickest to pay back and the easiest to check. Leave anything that needs a person's judgement or a personal touch until later.
Which three questions decide what to automate?
Ask these about any task your team does:
- How often does it happen? Daily or weekly work adds up far faster than something done twice a year.
- Does it follow the same steps every time? If you could write the steps on one page, a system can probably follow them.
- Does it need judgement? If the right answer depends on reading a situation or a person, keep a person on it.
A task that is frequent, repeatable and needs no judgement is a strong first candidate.
How do you find these tasks?
For one week, ask everyone on the team to note anything they do more than once a day that feels like copying, chasing or checking. Typical signs are typing the same details into two places, sending the same message again and again, or putting together the same summary every week.
Then write down the steps of each task as it happens today. This alone often shows steps that can simply be dropped.
How do you rank them?
For each task, estimate three things:
- How many times a week it happens.
- How many minutes it takes each time.
- What a mistake costs: a lost customer, a late payment or just a correction.
Multiply the first two to get the weekly time it takes. Start with the task that saves the most time with the least risk if something goes wrong.
What should you not automate first?
- Anything customers expect a person to handle, such as complaints or sensitive conversations.
- Processes that change every week or that your team is still working out.
- Tasks that happen so rarely that the setup would take longer than doing them by hand for years.
Do you need new software to automate?
Often not. Many tasks can be automated by connecting the tools you already use, so your team keeps working in screens they know. Start there, and only add new software when the existing tools can't do the job.
How do you check it is paying off?
Measure the time a task takes before you automate it, then again a month after. Keep a person in the loop at first: let the system do the work and someone check the results, until you trust it.
Automation should free your team from repetitive work so they spend more time with customers. If it creates more checking than it saves, simplify it or switch it off.