I want to use Keith Cunningham's Thinking Time to figure out which of our legacy administrative processes is costing us the most money and should be targeted for AI automation first. What specific questions should I write down?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To find the real leverage points for AI in your business, you must sit quietly with a pen and notepad, free of distractions. Do not focus on the technology itself. Focus entirely on the friction, costs, and delays in your current operations.

Write down these specific Thinking Time questions to guide your focus:
- Which routine administrative task takes our team the longest to complete but requires the least amount of critical thinking?
- Where do we have highly paid, skilled employees spending hours copy-pasting data between different software systems?
- If we doubled our business volume tomorrow, which specific administrative seat would we have to hire for first, and why?
- Where do customer requests sit idle in our inbox because we are waiting on manual approvals or standard data extraction?

Spend forty-five minutes writing answers to these questions. Look for the areas where your human capital is being wasted on low-value data manipulation.

By identifying the exact administrative bottlenecks that limit your capacity, you find the perfect target for your first AI integration. This disciplined approach prevents you from buying trendy tools that solve nonexistent problems and ensures your technology investments yield a massive, measurable return.