5 Business Tasks You Should Automate Today

Not all automation is created equal. Some workflows are complex, risky, and genuinely need human judgment. Others are repetitive, predictable, and a complete waste of skilled people's time.

Here are the five tasks that most businesses should automate immediately — with real time estimates.

1. Lead Qualification & CRM Entry

Time cost without automation: 15-30 minutes per lead

With AI automation: 0 minutes (fully autonomous)

When a prospect fills in your contact form, do you manually:

• Read the message
• Check their LinkedIn / company
• Score their fit
• Enter data into your CRM
• Assign to a sales rep
• Send an acknowledgment email

An AI agent can do all of this in under 30 seconds, 24/7, with zero errors in data entry.

What to build: An AI workflow that triggers on form submission, researches the prospect, scores them 1-10, populates your CRM, and routes to the right person.

Estimated ROI: If you get 50 leads/month, save ~20 hours. At £40/hr, that's £800/month saved.

2. Social Media Content & Scheduling

Time cost without automation: 5-15 hours per week

With AI automation: 30 minutes review time

The average business owner or marketing team spends enormous time creating and scheduling content. AI agents can:

• Generate post ideas based on your niche and trends
• Write platform-optimised copy (LinkedIn ≠ X ≠ Instagram)
• Source relevant images or create prompts for image generation
• Schedule across all platforms
• Report on what performed best

What to build: A weekly content generation workflow that outputs a content calendar, draft posts, and auto-schedules approved content.

3. Competitor & Market Monitoring

Time cost without automation: 3-8 hours per week

With AI automation: 0 hours (autonomous alerts)

Keeping tabs on competitors is critical but tedious. What changed on their website? Did they launch a new product? Change pricing? Post a job that hints at their strategy?

An AI agent can:

• Monitor competitor websites for changes
• Track their social media and PR
• Summarise weekly intelligence reports
• Alert you to anything significant immediately

What to build: A scheduled web scraping + analysis agent that delivers a weekly digest to your inbox (or Slack/Teams).

4. Invoice Processing & Accounts Payable

Time cost without automation: 2-4 hours per invoice cycle

With AI automation: Near-zero (review exceptions only)

Processing invoices is mind-numbing manual work. AI agents can:

• Extract data from PDFs (vendor, amount, due date, line items)
• Match against purchase orders
• Flag discrepancies for human review
• Auto-approve within policy limits
• Post to your accounting software

What to build: A document processing agent integrated with your accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage).

5. Customer Support Triage

Time cost without automation: Significant — especially outside business hours

With AI automation: 70-80% of tickets fully resolved

For most businesses, 70-80% of support queries are variations of the same 20-30 questions. An AI agent can:

• Classify incoming tickets by type and urgency
• Resolve common queries instantly with accurate, on-brand responses
• Escalate complex/sensitive issues to humans with full context
• Operate 24/7/365

What to build: An AI support agent trained on your documentation, FAQs, and past ticket history — integrated with your helpdesk (Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk).

Where to Start

The biggest mistake is trying to automate everything at once. Pick the task that:

1. Consumes the most time

2. Is most repetitive and predictable

3. Has the lowest risk if something goes slightly wrong

For most businesses, that's either lead qualification or customer support triage.

Book a free 15-minute call and we'll identify your highest-ROI automation in the first 5 minutes.