Before you open a req, spend a week watching where the work actually queues. In our experience four of the five biggest time sinks are routing, not judgement.
The test for mechanical work
Work is safely automatable when the inputs are structured, the rule is stable, and a wrong answer is cheap to reverse. Fail any of the three and you are automating a liability.
The five
Intake triage. Status chasing. Reconciliation of two systems that should agree. Document extraction into a fixed schema. Scheduled reporting that nobody has changed in a year.
Four of the five biggest time sinks are routing, not judgement.
What not to automate
Anything where the exception rate is above a fifth, or where the person doing the work is also the person who notices when the rule is wrong. Automating that role removes your only detector.
