Most teams overcomplicate AI automation. They start with chatbots or content generators, fight to integrate them, and conclude that automation is hard. It isn't — you're just starting in the wrong place. Here are five automations that pay for themselves in weeks, ranked by ROI.
1. Inbox triage
Train an LLM on your last 1,000 emails. It labels new ones (sales lead, support, internal, noise), drafts replies for the easy ones, and routes the rest to the right person. You'll save 5–10 hours a week for any founder or ops lead.
2. Lead enrichment
When a form is submitted, an automation pulls the company's website, LinkedIn, and recent news, summarizes it, and drops a 3-line briefing in your CRM before you even open the lead. Conversion rates rise because your first reply is informed.
3. Meeting follow-ups
Connect your meeting recorder (Fireflies, Granola, etc.) to an automation that summarizes calls, drafts a follow-up email, and creates tasks in your PM tool. No more lost commitments.
4. Content repurposing
Every long-form asset (podcast, webinar, blog post) gets multiplied: an LLM generates LinkedIn carousels, Twitter threads, newsletter snippets, and YouTube descriptions. One asset, ten outputs.
5. Internal Q&A
Index your docs, Notion, and Slack into a private retrieval system. New hires ask 'how do we do X?' and get the answer with source links. Onboarding goes from weeks to days.
