How to Identify the Best Workflow Automation Opportunities in Your Business

Jack Kokko, CEO and Co-founder of AlphaSense once said, “We are at a tipping point where AI-driven insights are no longer a luxury but a necessity – every company’s market value is the sum of the decisions it makes.

And in today’s fast-paced business environment, companies live or die by their decisions and those decisions are getting better (or worse) depending on how we use tools like AI and automation.  In this post, we’ll explore what workflow automation actually means, why it’s worth doing, how to spot the best things to automate in your workflow, and how AI insights help make smarter decisions.

Workflow automation is when you let technology handle repetitive tasks for you, automatically. We previously explained workflow automation in detail in our blog What Makes a Workflow ‘AI-Enhanced’?; if you haven’t read that post, it’s a great starting point for your AI-powered workflow.

How does it work under the hood?

Most automation systems let you define a series of triggers, conditions, and actions:

• A trigger is the starting event (e.g. “new support ticket created” or “form submitted” or “it’s 9:00 AM on Monday”).
• Conditions are optional checks (e.g. “if the ticket is about billing, then do X, if it’s about technical issue do Y”).
• Actions are what the software will do (e.g. “send an email,” “update a database field,” “create a task”).

You string these together like a little recipe. Once it’s set up, the automation will run whenever the trigger happens, following the rules you set. It’s like programming a little robot assistant to do part of your job. Workflow automation isn’t about replacing complex human judgment or creative work – it’s about taking the boring, repeatable tasks off people’s plates. To put it simply, if you find yourself saying “ugh, not this again” about a work task, that task might be a good candidate for automation.

Where do we exactly start the automation process?

The first step is to map out your current workflows. You can’t improve (or automate) what you don’t fully understand. So it’s time to play detective and maybe grab a pen and large notepad (or a flowchart tool, if that’s your style) and actually diagram how your key processes run each day.

Picture one important process in your business, maybe it’s order fulfillment, or employee onboarding, or content publishing, or expense approval. Now break it down:

• Who does what, step by step?
• Where do things slow down or wait for approval?
• Which steps involve transferring information from one place to another?
• What decisions are made along the way?

This is called a workflow analysis. You want to capture the as-is process. Talk to the people involved; oftentimes they’ll say “well, first I get this spreadsheet, then I manually filter these rows, then I email John to get confirmation, then I update this other system…” etc. Write it all out or make a flow diagram. Once you map the current process, a few things will become apparent:

• You’ll see obvious bottlenecks or pain points (like “why does it sit in approval for 3 days here?”).
• You’ll notice steps that are very manual and repetitive.
• You might even find steps that seem unnecessary or overly complicated.

Now, the art of spotting automation opportunities involves asking a few key questions about each step in that process:

• Is this step repetitive and time-consuming? Tasks that are done the same way over and over, especially if they eat up a lot of time, are prime candidates. E.g., data entry, pulling weekly reports, sending routine emails. If your team spends hours on something that’s essentially clerical and follows a formula, automation could likely handle it.
• Does this step involve straightforward rules or decisions? If the task is basically following an “if X, then Y” rule, a script can probably do it. For example, “if order total is above ₹5000, require manager approval; if not, auto-approve” a system can make that decision.
• Is this step prone to human error? Be honest: are mistakes happening here? Manual data transfer steps are notorious for this. If a particular task frequently results in errors or requires repeated double-checking, it may be suitable for automation. While computers are not perfect, they can reduce issues such as typographical mistakes or missing attachments. Automating steps that are prone to errors can significantly enhance quality.
• Is this a bottleneck or slow point? Identify where your process slows down. Maybe everything waits on a weekly meeting, or on one person who is swamped. Sometimes automation can unclog that bottleneck. For instance, if everything halts because forms pile up waiting for approval, you might automate a reminder or even auto-approve low-risk items to free up the flow. Or maybe generating a report is slow because it’s done manually on Fridays. Automating it to run at the end of the day, could speed up downstream actions.
• Does this step happen at high volume? Some tasks are quick but happen hundreds or thousands of times, which adds up. For example, processing incoming emails or sorting transactions. If a task takes 1 minute but occurs 500 times a day, that’s over 8 hours of work daily. Even minor automation there (like auto-tagging or sorting) could save significant aggregate time. High frequency tasks are low-hanging fruit for automation, each second saved per task multiplies out.
• What’s the ROI and feasibility? Some things might be technically automatable but not worth it (maybe they’re too complex or happen rarely). It’s okay to skip those. You want the sweet spot where you see clear benefits (time saved, errors reduced, faster turnaround, happier customers/employees) and where implementing automation is practical with available tools. Often it helps to do a rough cost-benefit: “If we automate this, we save ~20 hours a month, which is like ₹X worth of labor, plus we avoid late fees that occasionally happen” versus “It’ll take a developer 2 weeks to set up, which costs ₹Y.” If X >> Y, go for that one.
• And importantly, ask the team! The people who do the work every day know exactly what annoys them. They might already have a wish list: “If only I didn’t have to manually compile these stats every day!” Get their input on what could be automated and what would free them up or reduce stress.

Conclusion

Once you apply these lenses, you’ll create a list of potential automation opportunities. You might end up with, say, 10 candidates. Then you can prioritize which one to focus on. Perhaps start with a couple that are easy wins to get momentum. Keep in mind not everything should be automated. Some steps are better left human, maybe they require personal touch or complex judgment or are too variable. And that’s fine! A specialist can help you map out these constraints before applying it to the workflow.

AI-driven insights are becoming essential because they directly feed into making high-quality decisions quickly. We humans have biases and sometimes make calls on gut feeling. AI provides an objective viewpoint. It integrates data from all corners including sales, operations, finance, external market data etc. and give you a comprehensive insight. AI can analyze and even decide or recommend in real time. Some companies now have AI in the loop for decisions like “which ad to show to this user” or “approve this transaction?” That’s automated decision-making at the micro-level. Even at macro levels, AI can drastically cut the time needed to come to a conclusion. As noted earlier, having an advantage is key to making sound decisions. AI is that advantage which is turning data into actionable intelligence continuously.

You might be imagining that, to automate workflows you need some super fancy AI robots of your own. Not necessarily! There’s a huge range of tools out there, from simple to sophisticated, that can help automate workflows. The best tool or method really depends on what you need to automate. We will be sharing more about different tools and ways to handle workflow automation in the next blog post, so stay tuned!