What should you automate first?
Five questions that sort the workflows worth automating from the ones that aren’t. Practical decision support, not an AI readiness quiz.
Ten minutes. Your workflows, not generic examples.
The five questions
- Outcome
- Can you name the result in one sentence?
- Repetition
- Does it happen often enough to matter?
- Data
- Can a system already reach what it needs?
- Exceptions
- What share of cases follow the rules?
- Risk
- What happens when it gets one wrong?
ORDER: what a good answer to each question looks like.
- Outcome
- A sent quote, a booked job, an updated record. If the result can’t be named in a sentence, there is nothing to test the workflow against later.
- Repetition
- Daily beats weekly. Weekly beats quarterly. Something that comes up twice a year is usually cheaper to keep doing by hand.
- Data
- If the details live in someone’s head, a notebook or a group chat, that is the problem to solve first. Automation doesn’t solve it.
- Exceptions
- The routine path automates. The exceptions reach your team prepared, which is more useful than a system that guesses at them.
- Risk
- Low-stakes errors get caught and fixed. High-stakes ones keep a person in the loop, and that stays true however well it runs.
Score a workflow against all five and the answer is usually obvious.
A short list, not a report.
The Clarity Map walks your actual workflows through these five questions and hands back a ranked short list: what to automate first, what to leave manual, and what needs a person in the loop. It is the long way round to the same question we ask everywhere else on this site, for people who would rather work it out on paper first.
Describe it and we run the same five checks.
Two routes to the same answer. This is the shorter one.
- Maybe you’d rather work through the five questions yourself first.
- Maybe you’d rather describe it once and let us do that part.
Describe what happens today and we’ll run the same five checks over it, then tell you what we’d automate first and what we’d leave alone. Same questions, same answer, less typing.
Prefer to say it out loud? Book a 30-minute call.
About the process
Four questions. Owen picks up the rest on the call.
Got it, thanks.
We read every one of these ourselves. Here’s what happens next.
- We look at the process you described and how it touches your systems.
- We come back within one working day. Reply to that email and it reaches Owen directly.
- If it’s worth building, we’ll tell you what we’d build and what should stay human. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you that.