When I started automating using agentic AI—which I really got into properly at the start of 2025—I’d already been doing automations for a few years. But those were mostly without AI, simply because the AI tools we have now didn’t really exist in that form. Once I started, I got super excited—I’m a bit of a geek for new tech—and I ended up automating all sorts of things that I’d never actually use in the real world. For example, I automated how to create my D&D characters—really showing my geeky side there—and I automated business processes that took longer to automate than just to do manually.
What I learned from that period is simple: there’s no point in automating anything until you know what actually needs automating. Before you dive into AI, the best person to talk to is a business coach or someone who can look at your business from a third-party perspective. Identify where the real time sinks are. What are your staff spending hours on that could be streamlined?
A great example is a help desk. If you have staff answering phones or emails for basic support questions, that’s a perfect area to add some automation. You can use an AI voice or chatbot to handle the initial queries, give basic answers, and only pass the tougher issues on to a human. That saves hours of firefighting time. But you won’t know where to do that until you really analyse your own processes.
So how do you do that? It’s pretty straightforward: just have your staff jot down what they’re doing every hour for a while, note what’s repetitive, and see where patterns emerge. If you already track time, even better. Once you have that data, you can see what can be handed off to AI so your humans can focus on what only humans can do. When you do that, automation becomes a whole lot easier and a lot more effective.
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