Alexey Shurov.
Free tool

What to automate first, a scoring tool

List up to four tasks your team repeats every week. Answer five questions about each and the tool ranks them, says which to automate first and which to leave alone, and explains why.

How the score works

Each task gets points for five things. How many hours a week it takes, how regular the input is, whether the rules are written down, whether there are past examples to test against, and how easy a mistake is to catch. The most a task can score is 14.

The questions are the ones that decide whether a project works. Volume makes it worth doing, regular input and written rules make it possible, past examples make it testable, and the cost of a mistake decides how much a person stays involved.

What the verdicts mean

A strong first candidate is frequent, rule-based work with examples to test against. Start it in shadow mode, beside the team, before it acts on anything.

Where the work is mostly judgement, the right design is decision support. The agent gathers and ranks, and a person decides.

Where a task takes under two hours a week, an agent is the wrong tool. A form, a template or a script will fix it for less. Where there are no past examples, collect them first, because without real cases there is no honest way to test what you build.

What it leaves out

It is a first sort, not a design. It does not know your systems, how clean your data is or how the team feels about the work, and each of those can change the order. Use it to choose what to look at properly.

Nothing you type leaves your browser unless you press send.

Common questions

What should a business automate first with AI?

Work that is frequent, follows rules someone could write down, arrives in a fairly regular form and has past examples to test against. Order entry, timesheet checking, quote preparation and report compilation are common first choices. Avoid starting with rare tasks or work that is mostly judgement.

Which tasks should not be automated with AI?

Tasks that take very little time, tasks where nobody can state the rules, and decisions where a mistake is costly and hard to catch. For the last kind, use an agent to prepare the decision and keep a person making it.

How do I know if a task is big enough to automate?

Measure it for one real week. If the team spends only an hour or two on it, a simpler fix such as a form or a script is usually better value. The ROI calculator on this site works out the payback for larger tasks.

Is the scoring tool free?

Yes. It runs in your browser, and nothing you type is sent anywhere unless you choose to send the shortlist to me.

Want the real numbers for your process

I build and run production AI agents that take repetitive work off operational teams. Send me the task and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth automating.

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