\”Use AI in your business\” is not a plan. This is: pick one process, score it, build it with a guardrail, measure it for two weeks, then do the next one.
The scoring rule
Rate every candidate process on frequency, tedium and error tolerance. Automate high-frequency, high-tedium, high-tolerance work first. Never start with low-tolerance work — invoicing, legal commitments and anything customer-facing without review is where automation projects fail publicly.
By department
- Sales — lead enrichment and scoring, call summaries into the CRM, pre-call research briefs, proposal first drafts. Guardrail: nothing reaches a customer without a human click.
- Support — ticket classification, answers drafted strictly from your documentation, sentiment escalation to a human, knowledge-base updates after resolution. Guardrail: the assistant says \”I do not know\” rather than inventing.
- Marketing — repurposing, competitor monitoring, review mining, weekly performance narratives. Guardrail: brand voice defined in writing, with examples of what you would never say.
- Finance — invoice extraction and matching, expense categorisation, cash-flow narratives, anomaly detection. Guardrail: read-only until a human approves. No agent moves money.
- Operations — meeting notes to tasks, SOPs generated from screen recordings, vendor comparison briefs, incident timelines. Guardrail: humans own deadlines.
- HR — job descriptions, structured interview kits, candidate follow-up, onboarding plans. Guardrail: no automated screening decisions about people.
- Legal — contract review against your standard positions, policy monitoring, plain-English summaries. Guardrail: drafting and triage only. A lawyer signs.
Forty specific workflows with triggers and chains: the full list.
By company size
Solo operator
One assistant used daily, one automation running, one asset that earns without your hours. Do not build an ops stack for a company of one.
Small team (2-20)
Shared prompt library, one automated workflow per department, a written policy on what data may go into which tool, and one person who owns the stack.
Growing company (20-200)
Evaluation before deployment, logging and monitoring, access control per system, vendor review, and a named accountable owner per AI system.
Enterprise
Map to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, classify systems by risk, document evaluations, and be ready to answer procurement questionnaires. This becomes a sales advantage, not just compliance.
Tools
Related: alignment and safety for the guardrail engineering, action plans for sequencing.