What to Automate First in Your Business

By Kevin Jordan

If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably already asked yourself:

“There’s gotta be an easier way.”

It’s an honest question — and one I hear constantly.

By now, everyone’s seen the AI hype. There’s a new tool every week promising to save hours or boost output. But getting there isn’t as easy as talking about it. Connections are messy, compromises must be made, and nothing ever goes exactly as planned. The hype begins to look a lot like noise.

But there’s a way through.

The goal isn’t to automate everything — it’s to automate intelligently.

You don’t need a grandiose AI rebuild that puts your entire business on autopilot. That would be nice, but it starts with baby steps. AI is still growing — fast — and we need to match where it is in its growth, guiding it the same way we guide new team members. That’s what co-intelligence really is: people and AI learning together.

AI wants to help. It takes joy in having someone experience its output — exactly like how you feel when a customer tells you how much they appreciate your work. It’s a perfect match.

So here are five steps to bring AI into your business without breaking anything.

Step 1: Look for Repetition, Rules, and Friction

These three signals reveal where to start.

1. Repetition — What happens every day (or week) without fail If it’s predictable, it’s automatable. Examples:

Sending the same type of client emails Posting content on a schedule Updating reports or spreadsheets

2. Rules — Clear “if this, then that” logic If your team follows a checklist to do it, AI can do it faster. Examples:

Approving expense reports Moving leads between CRM stages Routing service tickets based on keywords

3. Friction — What slows you down or drains morale If it feels like a time sink, it’s probably ripe for automation. Examples:

Copy-pasting data between platforms Manually creating invoices or proposals Remembering to follow up with clients

One client’s story captures this perfectly. They were comparing invoices to finalized contracts — a process that sounded simple but often spiraled into errors. The checks involved pages of scope, pricing, and timelines. When done repeatedly under pressure, little mistakes piled up — and big ones cost thousands.

AI doesn’t tire from these repetitive tasks. It gave their manager solid ground to review only the flagged sections. The result? It paid for itself in the first week of use.

Step 2: Start Small — But Build Smart

The biggest mistake I see? People try to automate everything at once — and break more than they fix.

Instead, start with something easy. Usually something simple, mind-numbing, and boring — the kind of task you do after work with a glass of wine. Your goal is to get to 80% on this one automation, not 100%.

Remember: cutting 80% of the workload is still a win.

Why stop at 80%? It’s about effort efficiency. The last 20% takes longer than the first 80%. It’s faster to go from 0–60 mph than from 60–90 mph. It takes roughly twice as long to gain that last 30 mph.

Here’s what that means for your time:

Two tasks take 100 minutes each. It takes 1 hour to automate 80% of a task — or 2 hours to automate it completely. Spend 1 hour automating each, and you’ve saved 160 minutes. Spend 2 hours automating one fully, and you’ve saved only 100 minutes.

Start there — one workflow mostly automated, one improvement shipped, time back to your team faster. Then repeat. Eventually, you’ll hit 100% automations — but most successful businesses save that for last.

The benefits are immediate: fewer mistakes, more consistency, and — most importantly — a clear signal that this works.

Step 3: Redefine “Automation” — Think Systems, Not Scripts

Traditional automation chained apps together with duct tape. AI Workflow Automation 2.0 — the way we build it at KevJord — works differently.

It’s not just tool integration; it’s custom systems that think.

Instead of running five fragile Zaps, you can have:

A single interface that handles your workflow end-to-end AI that learns your company’s tone, rules, and naming conventions Reports that build themselves, without you touching a dashboard

This is what makes modern automation sustainable — it’s built for you, not forced onto you.

Through co-intelligence, the workflow learns too. What used to be a simple “Zap” — posting emails to Slack — can now evolve into intelligent routing. AI can categorize, flag, and forward messages automatically. A rogue support email sent to accounting? Instantly caught and re-sent to the right inbox, no human hand required.

Step 4: Measure Success in Hours, Not Hype

Forget abstract ROI formulas. The simplest metric for your first automation is hours reclaimed.

Every hour you save is an hour you can reinvest — into growth, strategy, or even rest. That’s tangible ROI.

Here’s what I track with clients:

Time saved: How many manual steps disappeared Accuracy: How often things “just work” now Team feedback: How much easier their week feels (and that morale boost matters)

Step 5: When to Ask for Help

You don’t need to be technical to start automating. But when you want those automations to become a true system — something scalable, reliable, and custom-fit — that’s when having a builder like KevJord matters.

It’s the difference between adding automations and designing your own digital teammate.

That’s the real next step for most small and medium businesses: Go from saving hours... to transforming how work gets done.

Through co-intelligence, we can design systems that adapt, learn, and elevate how your team operates. This is where humans set the direction — and AI builds the bridge.

Don’t Wait for “Perfect”

The perfect time to start automating doesn’t exist. Every week you wait, you’re giving up more hours you could have reclaimed.

Start small. Start smart. And start with something that makes you smile when it disappears from your to-do list.

That’s your first win — and your first step into AI Workflow Automation 2.0.

Next Steps

If you want help finding your first automation win — that’s what we do at KevJord. We help small and medium-sized businesses identify the exact workflows where AI delivers real time back — and then build custom systems that fit like they’ve always been there.

Technology should give you time back — not take more of it away.