Which processes can you automate with AI?

A process that fits is a route that work takes again and again. Something comes in, a few steps happen to it, and something goes out. A job sheet arrives, someone reads it, looks up the matching assignment, copies the hours over and books them. Four steps, every day, always in the same order.

As long as people walk that route by hand, every step costs time and something slips through now and then. We put the route in code, exactly the way you walk it, and the system walks it as long as nothing unusual happens.

Every route begins with a trigger. In practice it is usually one of these: a mail with an attachment in a shared mailbox, a new file in a folder or on a drive, a record that changes in a system, a form filled in on your site, a message in a team chat, or simply the clock, every working day at seven.

We agree that trigger before we build. It also decides what happens when things go wrong: a route that sits on a mailbox has to know what it does with a mail that does not quite look the way it should.

A job sheet arrives as a PDF in a shared mailbox. The system reads it, looks up the matching assignment in the planning and queues the hours in the package your invoicing runs from. If something does not add up, the sheet goes to a separate folder with the reason attached. The exception and the final check stay with a person.

Or a planning board that every morning at six pulls the day's assignments from two systems that do not talk to each other, and puts them side by side with whatever is still missing. The planner sees on one screen what needs arranging and moves it themselves. The board moves nothing on its own.

Work that runs differently every time, and work where the contact itself is the value. Also work that comes back once a quarter, because the maintenance on it costs more than it returns.

So we start with one route that runs often enough for the difference to show. Once that works, the second is a good deal faster, because the connections are already in place.