AI & automation
Which business workflows should you automate first?
Choose useful automation opportunities by assessing repetition, rules, data quality, exceptions, and realistic operating value.
By Operithm ·
Look for repeatable work with clear ownership
Useful candidates include routing inquiries, checking document completeness, synchronizing customer records, and preparing recurring reports. A good first workflow has recognizable inputs, an accountable owner, and a result that can be checked.
Observe a few real examples, including an exception. Record frequency, handling time, waiting time, corrections, and what happens when a required tool is unavailable. This gives you a better basis than asking which tasks sound suitable for AI.
Use rules where rules are enough
If a field must match an approved value or a total must be calculated, deterministic logic is usually the clearer choice. AI may help with variable language, classification, summaries, or drafting. Test it against representative examples and route uncertainty to a person.
For example, an inquiry can be validated and assigned using rules, while AI prepares a draft summary for review. A consequential customer commitment should not depend on an unchecked generated response.
Estimate value conservatively
A starting estimate is monthly volume × minutes saved per item ÷ 60 × hourly labor cost. Treat this as an estimate of time capacity, not guaranteed cash savings. Subtract ongoing tool costs and account for review, exception handling, and maintenance.
As an illustration, 200 items with five minutes saved each creates roughly 16.7 hours of capacity before review and exceptions. Whether that becomes business value depends on how the team uses the recovered time.
- Can the input and expected result be checked?
- Who reviews uncertain or sensitive outputs?
- What happens if an event arrives twice?
- Can the owner pause and recover the workflow?
- What will you measure before and after the pilot?
Pilot one workflow before expanding
Define acceptance criteria, representative test cases, and a manual fallback. Observe the pilot with its operator and improve the failure paths before connecting more systems. Expand when the workflow is useful and understandable, not just because the demo runs successfully.