Article
Don't replace your employees with AI. Start by automating the annoying, repetitive work they have to do every day.
That is where you can save real effort and money without beginning with the biggest, messiest question in the business.
Nobody had asked why
I was working at a medical place once and noticed they were faxing reports every single day. Somebody would stand at the machine and punch in the numbers by hand.
I asked, “Why are you guys doing this manually?”
The answer surprised me. They had the technical ability. Nobody had asked the question before. The manual process was simply there, so people kept doing it.
I automated it with a simple API. That gave them hours back in the day.
The useful part of this story is how ordinary the problem was. It was repetitive. It was annoying. Nobody wanted to do it. Yet it stayed in place because nobody had stopped to think it through.
Look around before you automate
Start with the work already happening in your business. Look around and ask:
- What is repetitive?
- What is annoying?
- What is the work nobody wants to do?
Those questions can point you toward a practical place to begin. Start with one task that keeps consuming time because it has always been done by hand.
Then ask why it is still manual. The answer may reveal that the process is there by habit, not because anyone made a deliberate choice to keep it that way.
Start with one annoyance
Automation becomes much easier to think about when the target is specific. In this case, the target was standing at a fax machine and entering numbers every day.
That one distinction keeps the exercise grounded. Find the repetitive task. Ask why it exists. See whether a simple automation can take it away.
Try that exercise in your own business. Pick one annoyance and think it through. You may be surprised how far you get.