The first workflow most teams try to automate is the one they shouldn’t.
It’s almost always the visible one. The strategy memo. The client recap. Whatever executive summary somebody senior wants off their plate. Creative, judgment-heavy work where being slightly wrong is the kind of mistake people remember. Not the right place to start.
The workflow that actually wants to be automated has a different shape. It happens constantly. The work is consistent enough week to week that you’d describe it the same way each time. And the person doing it can walk me through it in about fifteen minutes — without reaching for old emails to remember last week’s example.
If those things aren’t true, you’re not ready to automate it. You’re ready to interview the person who does it and write down what they actually do. That’s the prerequisite. Most teams skip it.
The other thing nobody warns you about: error cost. Not theoretically — specifically. A weekly status report being a little off is recoverable. A client invoice being off is not. Map the failure modes before you build, not after.
The candidates that pass all of this tend to be boring. They won’t appear in a board deck. Some specific person on your team spends three or four hours a week on the work and quietly resents the time. Six months after it’s gone, nobody on the team will remember what it used to feel like to do by hand.
That’s the right first one. The fancy stuff comes later, and by then you’ll know what you’re doing.