What gets automated
Each of these is a scoped piece of work. Most businesses need three or four of them. Some need one. The map in week one says which, and which to leave alone.
Read and answered by me, usually within the day. If a spreadsheet and a checklist would do, that is the answer you get.
Workflow automationEvery day someone in your business copies information from one screen into another. A form into a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet into an invoice. An invoice into an email. That person is the integration, and the business stops when they are out.Quote and invoice automationThe quote is typed from the notes. The invoice is typed from the quote. The reminder is typed when someone remembers the invoice. Each step is a copy of the last one, made by hand, with a chance to get it wrong.Data sync between systemsThe customer's address is right in the CRM, wrong in the accounting system, and missing from the inventory tool. Which one is true depends on who updated it last. Nobody knows, so everyone checks all three.Reporting automationSomebody spends Sunday night, or the first three hours of Monday, exporting from four systems into a spreadsheet so you can see how last week went. By the time it is ready, it is Tuesday and it is already wrong.AI inbox and call triageYou do not have an email problem. You have a reading problem. Hundreds of messages and calls a week, most of them routine, a few of them urgent, and no way to tell which without opening every one.Document extractionSupplier invoices arrive as PDFs and get retyped into accounting. Customer IDs get photographed and filed by hand. Contracts get read once and the key dates forgotten. All of it is reading, and reading is what the machines are now good at.AI agent developmentEveryone is selling agents. Very few can show one that has run inside a real business for months without a person babysitting it. The difference is not the model. It is the job definition, the guardrails and the logging.Onboarding and intake automationEvery new customer, client or employee starts with the same twenty steps. Forms sent, documents collected, accounts created, someone reminded to do the next thing. It is the same every time and it is done by hand every time, which means it is done differently every time.
Tell me what is in the way.
One form, read by the person who would build it. If the honest answer is a checklist and no software, that is what you will hear.