\”Use AI in your business\” is useless advice. \”When a support ticket arrives, classify it, draft a reply from your documentation, and route anything about billing to a human with the account history attached\” is a project you can start today.
Here are forty workflows worth building, grouped by department. Each one has a trigger, a chain and a guardrail — the third part is the one people skip and the one that keeps you out of trouble.
The rule for choosing what to automate first
Score every candidate on three axes: frequency (how often it happens), tedium (how much nobody wants to do it), and tolerance (how bad is a mistake). Automate high frequency, high tedium, high tolerance first. Never start with low-tolerance work — invoicing errors and legal commitments are where automation projects go to die publicly.
Sales
- Inbound lead → enrich company data → score against your ideal profile → route or reject with a reason
- Call recording → summary, objections raised, next steps → CRM update → follow-up draft
- Weekly pipeline review → deals with no activity in 14 days flagged with a suggested nudge
- Prospect research brief before every first call: funding, news, hiring signals, likely pain
- Proposal first draft from a discovery transcript, using your approved template
Guardrail: nothing sends to a customer without a human click. Tools: Clay, Apollo, HubSpot.
Customer support
- Ticket → classify → draft answer grounded in your docs → agent approves or edits
- Recurring question detection → weekly list of documentation gaps
- Sentiment escalation: angry customer flagged to a human immediately, always
- Post-resolution: update the knowledge base with what actually solved it
- Multilingual reply drafting with a native-speaker review queue
Guardrail: the assistant answers only from your documentation, and says \”I do not know\” rather than inventing. Tools: Intercom.
Marketing
- Long content → clips, threads, newsletter section, carousel
- Competitor monitoring → weekly digest of their new pages and messaging shifts
- Review mining → the exact words customers use, fed into ad copy
- Performance report every Monday with three recommendations and one thing to stop
- Internal link audit: new post → suggested links from and to existing posts
Finance and admin
- Invoice inbox → extract line items → match to purchase orders → flag mismatches
- Expense receipts → categorised, with policy exceptions surfaced
- Cash-flow narrative: the numbers plus a plain-English explanation of what moved
- Contract renewal calendar with 60-day warnings and a summary of each term
- Month-end anomaly detection against the previous six months
Guardrail: read-only until a human approves. No agent moves money. Ever.
Operations
- Meeting → notes, decisions, owners, deadlines → project tool
- Daily standup digest assembled from ticket movement
- SOP generation from a screen recording of someone doing the task
- Vendor comparison briefs when a purchase threshold is crossed
- Incident timeline reconstruction from logs and chat
HR and hiring
- Job description drafting from a hiring manager conversation
- Structured interview kits with scoring rubrics per role
- Candidate follow-up so nobody is ghosted
- Onboarding plan generated per role, per team
- Anonymous feedback themes summarised quarterly
Guardrail: no automated screening decisions about people. Legal exposure, ethical exposure, and it does not work well.
Legal and compliance
- Contract review against your standard positions, flagging deviations
- Policy change monitoring in your jurisdictions
- Document retention and DSAR triage
- Plain-English summaries of agreements for the team who has to follow them
Guardrail: drafting and triage only. A lawyer signs.
Build order
One workflow. Two weeks. Measure hours saved and errors introduced. Then the next. Teams that try to automate six departments at once end up with six half-built systems nobody trusts. The Edaptus action plans sequence this properly, and AI for business maps it by company size.
