Automate Business Tasks With AI
15 jobs that repeat, grouped by the systems they run against. Each one lists what triggers it and the case where an agent has to stop and ask.
What makes a task automatable
Not “is it boring”. Boring and automatable are different questions, and conflating them is how automation projects end up six months in with nothing running. The three tests that actually decide it:
- Does something specific start it? A task with a clear trigger — an email lands, an invoice arrives, a clock hits Monday morning — can be automated. A task that starts when someone notices it needs doing cannot, because “noticing” is the part you would have to build.
- Is the procedure written down, or could it be? Not written down yet is fine. Impossible to write down is not. If two competent people would handle the same case differently and both be right, that is judgement, and judgement stays with a person.
- Do you know what the edge cases are? Every one of these jobs has a case where proceeding confidently is worse than stopping. If you cannot name yours, you are not ready to automate the task — you are ready to write it down, which is the cheaper project and has to happen first anyway.
Each page below is organised around that third test. Anyone can list what an agent does on a good day. The useful part is the sentence that starts “this is where it goes wrong”, and every task on this site has one, written for that task rather than borrowed from the others.
Finance & bookkeeping
bank reconciliation · expense coding · collections follow-up · commission calculation · document data extraction
Sales & CRM
lead follow-up · quote generation · data enrichment · appointment scheduling · meeting notes
Admin & contracts
email triage · status reporting · renewal tracking · contract review · RFP responses
Why these are grouped rather than one page each
They used to be fifteen separate pages. They were honest and they were thin, and the truth is that the fifteen jobs are not fifteen problems — they are three, because the tasks that share a system share their failure modes too. Bank reconciliation and expense coding break the same way, for the same reason, and reading them together tells you something reading them apart does not.
The old addresses still work. They redirect to whichever group absorbed them, which is also why you may land here from a link that pointed somewhere narrower.
Where to go instead
If you are thinking about a person’s workload rather than a specific job, the role pages break it down by what each role costs and which parts of it repeat. If you are thinking about a process that spans people, the function pages map each loop and the joins where it breaks. If you want the arithmetic before the shopping, the ROI calculator and the guide on sequencing are the place to start.