Where, Oh Where, Should I Start With AI? 

An alternate approach is to look inside your organization and engage with leaders and individual contributors to understand where they are experiencing pain points in their various daily activities. What should you be looking for? 

Here are the top indicators that can lead you to find your AI opportunities:

• Manual, Repetitive Tasks: This is the simplest and most obvious indicator, but it does take some process mapping to find these tasks. Once uncovered though, they are relatively easy to address, and your workforce will be thankful to be rid of these mundane tasks.
• Proprietary Process Knowledge: Every organization has those “indispensable” individuals who can never go on vacation because nobody else knows how to do their work. Take the time to learn and document the underlying business processes. What many feel are an unassailable set of tasks can be broken down into a set of rules—rules that are very often poised for automation via AI.
• Email-Based Approvals and Routing: Simply keep an eye out for those paperclips in email messages indicating documents being passed around via attachments. Many times these messages contain requests to review, provide feedback on, and/or approve content. Even worse, there are often more than two individuals involved in the process. These situations are primed for workflow automation, logic-based routing, and decision-making rules—all capabilities that AI can streamline.
• A Preposterous Abundance of Spreadsheets: Few organizations use Excel purely for data crunching. The ubiquitous spreadsheet tool manages projects, tracks to-do lists, outlines process flows, and in some extreme cases, runs entire team business processes. The presence of too many spreadsheets can be an indicator that an organization or team is doing things because “that is the way it’s always been done,” and that the use of spreadsheets was an acceptable way of working when a business process was started but has not been revisited or re-evaluated. Let AI be the catalyst to finally optimizing your processes, and let Excel just be Excel.
• Growth is Disproportionately Dependent Hiring More People: We all want our businesses to grow and would love that growth not to be solely dependent on hiring more people. Even worse is when scaling processes lead to inefficiencies and workforce expenses rise faster than the related revenue. There is no denying that there are tasks that require human expertise, but AI can complement people-talent and, as mentioned above, remove the mundane and repetitive.