Start with a frequent, bounded task whose result a person can check. Drafting an enquiry summary is a different risk from sending a customer message or changing an invoice. Some work needs a deterministic rule rather than AI: if a reliable form field can route a lead, a language model may add cost without improving the outcome.
Which tasks make useful first pilots?
Consider summarising an internal meeting, classifying a non-sensitive request, drafting a reply for approval or preparing a report from an agreed data source. Define the input, expected output, reviewer and fallback before choosing a tool. Keep payment, employment, legal and other consequential decisions outside an unattended pilot.
How should you choose between competing ideas?
- Frequency: how often does the task occur?
- Effort: measure current handling time rather than assuming it.
- Failure cost: what happens if a field is wrong or a task runs twice?
- Data access: can the task use a safe sample and restricted permissions?
- Review effort: does checking the result consume the time you expected to save?
What does an automation acceptance test look like?
Use normal, incomplete and unexpected inputs. Check that the workflow does not expose another record, repeat an action or continue after access is revoked. Test a provider timeout and show the reviewer how to recover. For external messages or record changes, agree an approval step and an audit trail before enabling live execution.
How do you judge the return?
Record handling time, corrections and completed outcomes before and during the pilot. Include model/API usage, workflow subscriptions, implementation, monitoring and maintenance. Treat a proposed time saving as a hypothesis until it is measured. An automation that creates extra checking work may need redesign or retirement.
What information should you share with a developer?
Share the steps, frequency, systems involved, permission boundaries and a synthetic example. Do not paste live customer data into an initial brief. Define who owns incidents and what happens when the automation is paused. Explore AI automation services, the CRM enquiry workflow and our security acceptance process.