How To Choose The First Workflow To Automate With AI

Start with a task that already repeats in your week, decide what a good result looks like, and only then decide where AI belongs in it.

Start With A Task That Repeats

A good first candidate happens often, follows roughly the same steps each time, and has an output you can check. Writing a first-pass reply to a common customer question fits. A one-off strategic decision does not.

Write the task as a short chain of steps before you touch an AI tool. A hypothetical example: a small agency receives project inquiries by email. The steps might be read the inquiry, note the budget and deadline, look up similar past projects, and draft a reply. Seeing the chain shows which steps are mechanical and which depend on judgment.

Separate Human Steps From AI Steps

For each step, ask who should do it. Pulling the budget and deadline out of an email is a reasonable job for AI, because you can check the result against the message. Deciding whether to take the project is a human decision.

Define what goes in and what comes out of each AI step. "Read this inquiry and return the budget, deadline and project type, or say a field is missing" gives you something to test. "Handle my inquiries" does not.

Plan For The Output Being Wrong

AI output can be wrong in ways that look fluent. Decide ahead of time what happens then. Who checks the draft before it goes out? What should the workflow do when an input is missing or odd? A workflow that has a review step and a path for bad input is easier to trust than one that assumes every run works.

Start with the review step in place. Review errors over repeated runs before changing the review step, and keep approval for actions that affect customers, money or access.

Test On Real Cases

Run the workflow on several past examples you are allowed to use before using it on live work. Remove personal and client details that the test does not need. Include a messy one. Compare the output with what you would have written yourself, and note where it missed. Change the instructions, run the same examples again, and see whether the misses went away.

Where The Course Fits

If this first workflow goes well and you want the full method, AI Workflows, Agents & Automation is an advanced course that runs from choosing a task all the way to production workflows, with evaluation cases, cost controls, fallback steps and a launch checklist along the way. Lesson 1 is a free preview, so you can check the pace and level before deciding.