One of my automations ran 880 times before I noticed it had produced nothing.
Green logs. Moving queue. Blank output, every single run, because the source it pulled from had quietly blocked it from day one. Nothing failed loudly, and that was exactly the problem. An automation you trust is an automation you stop watching.
That incident is why nothing in my operation gets automated anymore until it survives four questions:
Frequency. How often does the job repeat? Daily beats weekly beats monthly. Repetition is where a handoff compounds.
Time drain. How much of the week does it actually eat? Count the small interruptions, they are the expensive part.
Rules-clarity. Could you write the steps down so a new hire could follow them? A job that lives only in your head is not ready to hand to a machine.
Stakes if rough. If the output came back eighty percent right, is that a quick fix or a damaged client relationship? Your first workflow should be one where a near-miss is cheap.
Score your candidate jobs, five points each, twenty max. The winner is almost never the exciting idea. It is the boring job you could write the manual for. That is what makes it buildable this week.
A tool is a thing you open. A workflow is a thing that runs. Go build one that earns the trust before it gets the keys.
P.S. If you want to run this scoring live, on one of your own real jobs, come do it with me. I am teaching AI Without Getting Burned on Thursday, July 30, 7 pm in Sandy. 90 minutes, in person. You leave with one real thing already working and a clear rule for what to skip. There are a limited number of free seats, no card needed: catalystworks.consulting/ai-checklist
Three things before you go
Forward this to one business owner who is trying to figure out where AI fits in their business. One forward is more useful to me than ten retweets.
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Boubacar
I spent over a decade in HR at a Fortune 100. Now I'm a fractional AI leader who helps small businesses put AI to work.
[email protected] · signal.catalystworks.consulting