AI & Automation12 Aug 20266 min read
The Cheapest Automation Is the One You Do Not Build
Before we automate anything for a client, we try to delete the step. Roughly a third of the workflows we are asked to build should not exist at all.
A request usually arrives fully formed. A manager has watched their team retype the same figures into two systems for a year and wants a script that does it for them. The script is easy. The interesting question is why the same figures live in two systems.
So the first session is never about tools. We walk the process as it happens now, step by step, with the people who do it, and mark each step as one of four things: it produces a decision, it produces a record someone later reads, it exists because a system cannot talk to another system, or nobody can say why it exists.
That last category is larger than anyone expects. A weekly report nobody opens. An approval for amounts that are never rejected. A form filled in duplicate because a manager three years ago wanted a paper copy. Automating those steps makes them permanent, and makes them faster, which is worse.
Automation is a commitment. Anything you automate, you have agreed to keep doing forever.
What we automate first
Once the process is honest, the candidates are usually obvious. They share three traits: the step happens often, it follows the same rules every time, and a delay in it costs money. Lead follow-up is the classic case. Nobody disagrees that an enquiry should get a reply within the hour, and nobody manages it consistently by hand at volume.
We start with one workflow, put it live in two to three weeks, and leave the next one alone until the first has run through a full cycle. Staged delivery is not caution for its own sake. It is how you find out whether the saving you predicted is real before you spend on the next four.
Where AI belongs in this
Most of what we build is ordinary plumbing between systems that already exist. AI earns its place at the two ends of that plumbing: reading the messy thing a human sent in, and drafting the reply a human is about to send out. In between, deterministic rules are cheaper, faster and easier to explain when something goes wrong.
That is also why our default is draft-and-approve rather than send. A team that trusts the drafts will loosen the rule themselves within a month. A team that had unattended replies imposed on them never quite trusts the system again.
Suresh Natarajan
Founder, Digi Prag
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