We know we have administrative waste, but our department managers struggle to identify where AI will actually help. How do we uncover our highest-leverage operational friction points?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not ask your managers where they want to use AI. They will suggest shiny experiments that look interesting in a board deck but do nothing for your P and L. Instead, hunt for the points in your company where human beings are acting as expensive copy-and-paste bridges between disconnected software systems.

Look for operational pain by auditing four specific sources of truth:

- Job descriptions and recruitment postings. Look at what your team advertises when hiring administrative help. If half the bullet points involve data entry, scheduling coordination, or manual report compilation, you have found an operational leak.
- Internal support tickets and billing complaints. Pull your customer service and IT ticket logs. Look for recurring questions about order status, delivery dates, or simple account updates. Where customers repeatedly ask humans for basic system information, automation is missing.
- Time allocation on your major P and L lines. Your largest operating cost is payroll. Have your team track their time for two weeks and flag any recurring task that requires zero critical thinking but takes more than five hours a week.

Extract these friction points, list them on your Issues List, and prioritize the single bottleneck that releases the most human capacity. Target the low-value tasks that burn out good employees first.