Forget the hype for a minute. Here’s the most useful question you can ask about AI in your business: what do you do over and over again?
A catering business I know was spending about 90 minutes every week copying details from customer emails into a spreadsheet: orders, headcounts, dietary notes, one message at a time. It’s the kind of task that’s too small to complain about and too frequent to ignore. They handed that copying to an AI tool. Ninety minutes a week came back. They spent it on the phone with clients, and one of those calls turned into a standing monthly order.
That’s the whole trick at this stage. You’re not looking for something futuristic. You’re looking for repetition.
The rule of thumb
If a task repeats 50 or more times a month and mostly involves reading, sorting, copying, or drafting text, there’s a good chance AI can take a chunk of it off your plate. Not perfectly. Not entirely. But enough to matter.
How to spot yours
For one week, notice the moments where you think “I’ve done this exact thing a hundred times”:
- Retyping information from one place to another.
- Writing the same kind of email again and again.
- Summarizing or sorting a pile of messages.
- Pulling the same few numbers into the same report.
Write them down. That list is your AI starting point (opens in a new tab): not the flashiest tool, just the most repeated task.
Tomorrow: why you should start with your biggest headache, not the shiniest tool.