Prioritize Your First Workflow

By now you probably have a list of tasks that could be automated. The temptation is to start with the biggest, most impressive one. Resist it. Your first automation should be the one most likely to work well, quickly — because an early win builds confidence and frees up time for the next one.

Score each workflow on three things

1. Time it takes

How many hours a week does your team spend on this task, all in? A five-minute job that happens 40 times a week is worth more than a two-hour job that happens once a month. Frequency matters as much as duration — so think in total hours per week, not time per task.

2. How rule-based it is

Could you write the steps down for a new hire on a single page? If the task follows the same steps nearly every time, it's a great candidate. If it depends on judgment calls, relationships, or "it depends," it's harder to automate well — even with AI helping.

3. Risk if it goes wrong

Imagine the automation makes a mistake. Is the result a slightly awkward internal note, or a wrong invoice sent to your biggest client? Start where mistakes are cheap and easy to spot. You can work up to higher-stakes workflows once you've seen how automation behaves in your business.

The sweet spot

The ideal first workflow eats a lot of hours, follows clear rules, and is low-risk if something slips. Internal tasks — logging leads, routing requests, building a weekly report — often fit that profile better than anything customer-facing. Workflows that touch money or customers aren't off-limits; they just usually deserve a human review step at first.

Rank your own list

Use the tool below to enter up to five candidate workflows (we've filled in some common examples to get you started) and rate each one. They'll be ranked automatically, and the score is explained underneath.

Take your top-ranked workflow into the next module, where you'll put a dollar figure on what automating it is actually worth.