Before you build
Most automation fails before anyone opens a workflow editor. The tooling is not the hard part. Deciding what the process should be, and which steps a machine should never touch, is the hard part.
That decision is the work I sell. It comes before the build, and sometimes it ends the project early, with a recommendation not to build at all. That is a cheaper outcome than building the wrong thing.
§1 Why "just automate it" backfires
If the steps only live in someone's head, automating them just makes the guesswork faster. The machine repeats whatever the undefined process already got wrong, at scale, without anyone watching. The definition has to come first. That is the part most people skip, and it is the part that saves the budget.
The process that annoys you daily is tempting to fix first. But if its input is messy, its output is a judgement call, and there is no clear way to check the result, it is the riskiest place to begin. Start there and fail, and the ten easier wins behind it never get funded.
§2 How I assess
First I map how the work actually happens now, not how the org chart says it should. Then each process gets scored on three things. Is the input structured, or is it free-form email and conversation. Is the output checkable, or is it a matter of taste. Does it happen often enough to be worth the build. The process that scores well on all three is where the first build goes.
Where a step has one correct answer, a deterministic rule does it, not a language model. AI is best at the reading and the writing at either end. A contract gets filled by variable substitution, not by asking a model to draft the clauses. That split is a design decision, and it is the difference between a system you can trust and one that surprises you.
§3 What you get
The assessment is a written recommendation you own, whether or not you build with me. It says what to automate first, what to leave to people, and roughly what each piece would take. If the honest answer is that automation is not worth it yet, the recommendation says that too, and you have spent a small fixed fee instead of a large one.
§4 To start
Tell me the process that eats the most hours each week, which tools it touches, and how many people it involves. I will tell you whether it is the right place to start, and what the assessment would cover.