The AI Automation Audit. Finding the Ten Workflows Worth Automating First.
Every company has around ten workflows that account for most of the wasted hours. Finding them takes two weeks and saves a year of building the wrong thing.
7 min read
- Audit duration
- 2 weeks
- Never done
- Workflows shortlisted
- Top 10 by hours
- Whatever is loudest
- Build success rate
- 8 in 10
- from 2 in 10
Most automation projects fail at selection, not at engineering.
The team builds something that works perfectly and saves four hours a month.
Meanwhile the workflow costing sixty hours a month never gets looked at, because nobody complained about it loudly enough.
An audit fixes the selection problem.
It is unglamorous, it takes two weeks, and it is the highest return work in the whole project.
§01 · The problem
Where the time actually goes.
- 01Automating whatever someone complained about
- 02No baseline hours before building
- 03Frequency and duration never measured
- 04Judgement-heavy work chosen by mistake
- 05No owner for the workflow after launch
- 06Success declared without a re-measurement
You cannot rank workflows you have never measured. Almost nobody measures before building.
§02 · The mechanism
The AI workflow.
- 01
List every recurring workflow
Audit - 02
Measure frequency and duration
Audit - 03
Score judgement vs repetition
Scoping - 04
Rank by annual hours recoverable
Scoping - 05
Build the top three only
Development - 06
Re-measure and decide what is next
Validation
A person closes the loop: the workflow ends on a human or a check against a defined outcome.
- Audit
- Measurement done before anything is built
- Scoping
- A decision about what is in and out
- Development
- Engineering work inside the workflow
- Validation
- Checking the result against a defined outcome
§03 · The difference
Before vs after.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Build whatever was requested most recently | Build the three with the largest hour drain |
| No baseline, so no way to prove value | Baseline recorded before a line is written |
| Every team believes theirs is the priority | Priority argued from numbers, not volume |
| Complex workflows chosen for the demo value | Simple, high-frequency workflows chosen first |
| Half the builds quietly stop being used | Each build has a named owner |
| Next project chosen the same arbitrary way | Next project chosen from the ranked list |
§04 · The measure
Time saved.
| Task | Before | With AI |
|---|---|---|
| Audit | Not done | 2 weeks |
| Workflows evaluated | 1-2 | 30-50 |
| Builds still in use at 6 months | 20% | 80% |
| Hours recovered, year one | Unknown | Measured |
Continue reading
Tell us what you’re building.
Share a few details about what you need, and we’ll get back to you with a quotation.