5 processes you can automate with AI this week
Marco Neves 2 min read
When we talk about AI automation, many managers imagine months-long projects and six-figure budgets. The reality is simpler: there are automations with immediate returns that can be implemented in days. Here are the five we most often recommend as a first step.
1. Email triage and reply drafting
If your sales or support team receives dozens of emails a day, a good portion are variations of the same questions. An AI automation can classify each incoming email (quote request, technical question, complaint, billing) and prepare a draft reply based on your history and company documents. A person reviews, adjusts, and sends.
Typical savings: 1 to 2 hours per day per person in customer-facing teams.
2. Data extraction from invoices and documents
Manually copying data from supplier invoices into the ERP or Excel is one of the most common — and most error-prone — tasks in SMEs. Today’s AI tools read PDFs and scans, extract the relevant fields (tax IDs, amounts, dates, line items), and prepare the record for human validation.
Typical savings: 80–90% of the processing time per document.
3. Meeting minutes and summaries
Recording a meeting and getting a structured summary with decisions and next steps within minutes is now trivial with the right tools. The gain isn’t just the time spent writing minutes: it’s consistency, and the ability to search past decisions.
Typical savings: 30–45 minutes per meeting.
4. First drafts of commercial proposals
Most proposals reuse structure and content from previous ones. With AI, the first draft is generated from the client’s briefing and your company’s past proposals, keeping your tone and format. Sales goes from “writing from scratch” to “reviewing and personalising”.
Typical savings: 50–70% of the preparation time per proposal.
5. Automatic answers to frequent customer questions
Opening hours, delivery times, order status, return conditions — questions that occupy the team every day and have documented answers. An AI agent on your website or WhatsApp answers these at any hour and routes complex cases to humans.
Typical savings: instant answers to 60–80% of repetitive contacts.
Where to start?
Choose the process where your team loses the most time and that depends mostly on text and documents. Implement, measure for two weeks, and only then move to the next. Good automation is incremental.
Want to know which of these processes has the highest return in your company? Talk to us — the initial assessment is free.